Sense! What is ”sense”? A word meaning either little or much; simple and clear to the understanding, or various and carrying with it many connotations. It is one or other according as we measure the depth, the thoroughness, or the reality of the knowledge acquired. From a purely physical “sensation” we may trace the word through endless shades of signification; through “good” sense, “sound” sense, through the artistic and finer sensibilities, the “moral” sense, till it loses itself in the vague hint of a dim, unformed consciousness, pointing the way to the new world of the “inner senses.”
All these meanings and more are connoted by the phrase “Nineteenth Century Sense;” [[56]] for, by a daring metaphor, the tools which modern science places at our disposal are considered as “senses,” and even the faculty and power of analysis is sometimes included under the word.
Beginning with the simplest, the reader is led on to the most astounding phenomena[phenomena] of modern spiritualism in the first thirty-seven pages of this strange work. The author depicts in vivid language his own experiences, and the triumphs of phenomena produced by one of his personal friends, in a style which is often quaint and striking, though at times the writer’s disregard of many of the accepted rules of composition becomes—to say the least—irritating. But the matter of his book earns forgiveness for the manner in which it is formulated.
After carrying his reader to a pitch of interest and expectation as to the phenomena he describes, Mr. Darby suddenly plunges him into the frozen sea of scepticism by stating that all the phenomena produced under what seemed the strictest test conditions, were produced by conjuring and legerdemain, and by explaining the physical causes of some of the visions he has so graphically described. It will suffice to cite a single instance in illustration. “The President of the American Branch of the Indian Society of Theosophists (Professor Coues) ... spent an evening with me some time back in conversation on the subject of psychical phenomena. We parted at midnight. At seven o’clock the next morning I suddenly awoke, beholding the astral of the professor standing at my bed-side.”
This vision Mr. Darby explains by reference to the fact of the persistence of retinal images and the super-excitability of the nerves and brain. “Astral projections,” he concludes, “are of precisely similar significance.” We would feel obliged to the eminent American professor of physiology referred to if he would give his written opinion on the question thus raised. For Theosophists have heard of persons whose brains were in complete repose and fully occupied otherwise who have also seen the astral form of Professor Coues. How’s this?
He concludes, nevertheless, that materialistic agnosticism is the only “creed”? Far from it. This portion of the book is purely introductory; it forms the five door-steps leading to the Spiritus Sanctus—the laboratory of the Divine Spirit.
From this black depth of doubt and confusion, the reader is lifted suddenly into the clear ether, and his feet are placed on the “Rosicrucian Way.”
Whether called “Rosicrucian,” or by whatever other name, the “Way” is the “Way of Life,” the path which leads to freedom, to wisdom, to true living. Whole pages might well be quoted; a few aphorisms must suffice.
“A thing is to the sense that uses it what to the sense
It seems to be; it is never anything else.”