To the Editors of Lucifer.
I have to thank you for your kind insertion of my note on above in January issue of the Magazine.
I have not the slightest desire to quarrel with your prefaced comments on my style of writing. It seems to you to be “turgid,” and you take advantage of some unkind epithets lately dealt out to Theosophy in the Secular Review to return the compliment to me with interest added. Be it so. It would seem but fair to, let me say, compliment those, and those only, who have directly complimented you; but I have no wish, as I have just said, to find fault with any comment on Hylo-Idealism or on the methods of its advocacy. All criticism is, I know, received by the excogitator of the system with thanks, and, save that both he and I think your note re “Theobroma” not a little at fault (for explanation I refer you to the well-known Messrs. Epps), I can say the same for myself.
I can see, however, in spite of the raillery with which you honour us, that a right understanding of Hylo-Idealism—I beg pardon, High-low Idealism—is still very far from being yours. Why, in a recent issue of Lucifer the old difficulty of, as I call it, the “Coincident assumption of Materiality” is started as if it had never before been thought of. It is, in point of fact, fully dealt with in my “Appendix” to the “Auto-Centricism” pamphlet, which has already passed under your review! It is not worth while to enter once more upon this point; suffice it then to say, in addition, that I explained it also, at full length, to a Theosophical writer—Mr. E. D. Fawcett—in the Secular Review, some months ago. He had started the same venerable objection, but after my reply, he so far honoured me as not to return to the charge. Let him do so now, and then a Theosophical attack and a Hylo-Ideal defence will be before you. But, really, it is no argument against my position to extract some half-dozen lines of my writing from a contemporary and to follow this soupçon with three printer’s “shrieks.”
I shall wait with interest the promised letter from “C. N.,” placing Hylo-Idealism in a “new and very different light,” as you say. This is something quite new. Dr. Lewins, C. N., and I have, none of us, been able, hitherto, to find any material difference between our several presentations of the system.
I have the honour to be, Mesdames,
Your most obedient servant,
G. M. McC.
TO DR. LEWINS, AND THE HYLO-IDEALISTS AT LARGE.
The several learned gentlemen of the above persuasion, who have honoured Lucifer with their letters and articles, will please to accept the present as a collective Reply. Life is too short to indulge very often in such lengthy explanations. But “une fois n’est pas coutume.”