This feeling, rationalised and stripped of mystery, though not of wonder and solemnity, is the truth and life of Hylo-Idealism. Worship is done away with, not by iconoclasm, but by apotheosis. “By it we are, indeed, for ever and entirely relieved from the humiliating and overwhelming sense of human insignificance, thus making ourselves quite at home in the more than terrestrial grandeurs of the universe, in which our planet is but a sand-grain.”[[188]]
In conclusion, I should like to recommend Dr. Lewins’s tractate, with its Introduction by Mr. Courtney, and its succinct and luminous Appendix by G. M. Mc., and also Mr. Courtney’s articles reprinted from “Our Corner” to the attention of all sincere souls. Hylo-Idealism, or “Autocentricism,” has the merit of not being negative merely, but also positive and constructive, substituting for the “renunciation” preached by Christ and Buddha, a perfect fulfilment of self, and conquering selfishness by self-expansion. It is thus especially potent in the fields of theoretical and practical ethics, indeed the central idea of Spinoza’s admirable and still unsurpassed analysis of the Passions is distinctly deducible from our thesis, though generally regarded as an excrescence rather than a natural growth from his own. Upon all this I cannot, at present, dwell, but must content myself with the bare indication of fields of thought and action which are “white already to the harvest.”
On the Nile, Dec. 1887.
C. N.
WHAT OF PHENOMENA?
To the Editors of Lucifer:
“I avail myself of your invitation to correspondents, in order to ask a question.
“How is it that we hear nothing now of the signs and wonders with which Neo-theosophy was ushered in? Is the ‘age of miracles’ past in the Society?
“Yours respectfully,