"You've become a Theosophist!" I cried in alarm, for that familiar twinkle in his eye had been replaced by a strange exaltation.
"And what if I have?"
"Theosophy!" I cried scornfully—"Theology for Atheists! The main contemporary form of the Higher Foolishness."
"The Higher Foolishness!" echoed Marindin indignantly.
"Yes, the Foolishness of the fool with brains. The brainless fool fulfils himself in low ways—in alcoholic saturnalia, in salvation carnivals, in freethought hysterics, in political bombs. The Higher Foolishness expresses itself in aberrations of poetry and art, in table-rapping and theosophy, in vegetarianism, and in mystic calculations about the Beast."
"It is you who are the fool," he replied shortly. "Theosophy is true—that is, my form of it. Birth is but the name for the entry upon this particular form of existence.
"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.
The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar.
"The unborn pre-exist, even as the dead persist; and instead of addressing Posterity posthumously and circuitously, I have anticipated its verdict. I have written for the unborn, direct. I have been the apostle of the New Ethics among the pre-natal populations, the prophet of individualism among the unborn."
"What! You have propagated the teaching that free choice must be the battle-cry of the future, that the only genuine morality is that which is the spontaneous outcome of an emancipated individuality!"
"Precisely."