And if Troy was denied, and regarded as a myth; the existence of Herculaneum and Pompeii declared a fiction; the travels of Marco Polo laughed at and called as absurd a fable as one of Baron Münchausen's tales, why should the writer of Isis Unveiled and of The Secret Doctrine be any better treated? Mr. Charles Gould, the author of the above-cited volume quotes, in his excellent work, a few lines from Macmillan (1860), which are as true as life, and too much to the point not to be reproduced:
When a naturalist, either by visiting such spots of earth as are still out of the way, or by his good fortune, finds a very queer plant or animal, he is forthwith accused of inventing his game.... As soon as the creature is found to sin against preconception, the great (mis?) guiding spirit, à priori by name, who furnishes philosophers with their omniscience pro re natâ, whispers that no such thing can be, and forthwith there is a charge of hoax. The heavens themselves have been charged with hoaxes. When Leverrier and Adams predicted a planet by calculation, it was gravely asserted in some quarters that the planet which had been calculated was not the planet but another which had clandestinely and improperly got into the neighbourhood of the true body. The disposition to suspect hoax is stronger than the disposition to hoax. Who was it that first announced that the classical writings of Greece and Rome were one huge hoax perpetrated by the monks in what the announcer would be as little or less inclined than Dr. Maitland to call the dark ages?[1024]
Thus let it be. No disbeliever who takes The Secret Doctrine for a “hoax” is forced, or even asked, to credit our statements, which have already been proclaimed to be such by certain very clever American journalists even before the work went to press.[1025]
Nor, after all, is it necessary that any one should believe in the Occult Sciences and the Old Teachings, before he knows anything of, or even believes in his own Soul. No great truth has ever been accepted à [pg 461]priori, and generally a century or two has passed before it has begun to glimmer in the human consciousness as a possible verity, except in such cases as the positive discovery of the thing claimed as a fact. The truths of to-day are the falsehoods and errors of yesterday, and vice versà. It is only in the twentieth century that portions, if not the whole, of the present work will be vindicated.
It is not destructive of our statements, therefore, even if Sir John Evans does affirm that writing was unknown in the Stone Age. For it may have been unknown during that period in the Fifth Âryan Race, and yet have been perfectly known to the Atlanteans of the Fourth, in the palmy days of their highest civilization. The cycles of the rise and fall of nations and races are there to account for it.
If told that there have been cases before now of forged pseudographs being palmed off on the credulous, and that our work may be classed with Jacolliot's Bible in India—although, by the way, there are more truths mixed up with its errors than are found in the works of orthodox and recognized Orientalists—the charge and comparison will dismay us very little. We bide our time. Even the famous Ezour Veda of the last century, considered by Voltaire “the most precious gift from the East to the West,” and by Max Müller “about the silliest book that can be read,” is not altogether without facts and truths in it. The cases when the à priori negations of specialists have become justified by subsequent corroborations, form but an insignificant percentage of those that have been fully vindicated by subsequent discoveries and confirmed, to the great dismay of the learned objectors. Ezour Veda was a very small bone of contention compared with the triumph of Sir William Jones, Anquetil du Perron, and others in the matter of Sanskrit and its literature. Such facts are recorded by Professor Max Müller himself, who, speaking of the discomfiture of Dugald Stewart and Co. in connection with this, states that:
If the facts about Sanskrit were true, Dugald Stewart was too wise not to see that the conclusions drawn from them were inevitable. He therefore denied the reality of such a language as Sanskrit altogether, and wrote his famous essay to prove that Sanskrit had been put together after the model of Greek and Latin, by those arch-forgers and liars, the Brâhmans, and that the whole of Sanskrit literature was an imposition.[1026]
The writer is quite willing and feels proud to keep company with these Brâhmans, and other historical “liars,” in the opinion of our modern Dugald Stewarts. She has lived too long, and her experience [pg 462] has been too varied and personal, for her not to know at least something of human nature. “When you doubt, abstain,” says the wise Zoroaster, whose prudent aphorism is found corroborated in every case by daily life and experience. Yet, like St. John the Baptist, this Sage of the past ages is found preaching in the desert, in company with a more modern Philosopher, namely Bacon, who offers the same priceless bit of practical wisdom, when saying:
In contemplation [in any question of knowledge, we add], if a man begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.
With this piece of advice from the father of English Philosophy to the representatives of British Scepticism we ought to close the debate, but our Theosophical readers are entitled to a final piece of Occult information.