May 18, 1900.] 



SCIENCE. 



765 



shovel on the banks of the green Stanislaus, 

 I came to the true meaning of reality. Out 

 of my boyish guessings as to what I would 

 do were things that we know other than 

 what they seem, or were things we know 

 not clear before our eyes, arose at last the 

 majestic cosmoid of Sciosophy. As mate- 

 rial science works with microscope and 

 scalpel or with pick and plow, so must 

 spiritual science work with the iiner tools of 

 astral thought in its analysis and synthesis 

 of the fundamental entities of creation. 

 And these tools and methods do not soil the 

 hands or materialize the soul. 



" Speaking of Speculative Philosophy 

 (which is an inchoate branch of Sciosophy) 

 a distinguished adept of Boston has wisely 

 noted its superiority over the ' gutter- psy- 

 chology' so largely affected to-day. For as 

 he saj's, such study brings no contact of the 

 soul with vulgar matter. It ' does not soil 

 the hands' nor blunt the sensibilities, and its 

 reflex effect on the mind is purely one of 

 etherization. For this reason he especially 

 commends the study of Speculative Philoso- 

 phy to thoughtful people of leisure and es- 

 pecially to cultured women. And surely 

 the whole face of science and philosophy 

 will be changed when it falls into the fair 

 hands of the leisurely etherealized ' Eternal 

 Womanly.' 



" It will be seen that the study of Scios- 

 ophy is at once the complement, the op- 

 posite and the antidote of the study of ma- 

 terial science. Its first principle is this, 

 Matter rests on Mind. On mind it is de- 

 pendent for its recognition which is its ex- 

 istence. Its laws are mental channels 

 merely, the grooves into which the thought 

 sustaining it most naturally falls. With 

 your own mind you can cut such grooves, 

 can make such laws ; therefore do it ! This 

 will exercise your highest powers, the 

 powers we call astral or star-born, because 

 in all the visible Universe nothing can rise 

 higher than the stars and nothing works so 



persistently as they in their quiet astral 

 fashion. 



" Would you change the law of gravita- 

 tion ? Then change it ! You have but to 

 assert yourself. If you have the courage 

 to try, it is nothing to remove mountains, 

 as men once did of old, as men still do who 

 live upon the greatest mountains that there 

 are. To remove their astral phantoms is 

 the first work of the mind. When these 

 are gone the material mountains crumble 

 away into shapeless granite sand. 



" But you may fail when first you try 

 your eternal powers. Doubtless we are all 

 feeble on the astral plane. We have lived 

 on the material plane so long, with our eat- 

 ing of beef and our scramble for gold that 

 the divine Karma has grown weak within 

 us. We know not the powers we hold and 

 we dare not put them to the test. So we 

 buy our tickets on railway trains rather 

 than flutter the pinions of the soul. We 

 yield to the domination of matter and force 

 when we should biing matter and force as 

 humbled servants to our feet. We search 

 far and wide for the useful and we miss 

 that which is above all use, perfection car- 

 nate, incarnate and re-incarnate, the astral 

 Karmal aura of the soul ! " 



After portraying in such fashion the 

 value of effort which has its beginning, di- 

 rection and end within the circle of voli- 

 tion, and after showing that the Karmal 

 powers should be spent on the imponder- 

 able astral body, not on the dull muscles 

 designed only as its I'efuge and shield, Mr. 

 Dean returned to the basal principles of 

 Sciosophy. These are, stated categorically 

 as follows : 



"1. Truth exists only in terms of human 

 experience. ' The thing we long for that we 

 are.' This accords with Lessing's Dictum. 

 ' It is not the Truth but the search for Truth 

 for which Man searches.' In other words 

 Absolute Truth exists only in the Absolute 

 expression of the Universal Mind. 



