1 882.] 
Occultism Reconsidered. 
405 
or, as we prefer to call it, Open Science. These relations 
are not too clearly expressed, and apparently not too amicable. 
We read (p. 1) that “ modern metaphysics, and to a large 
extent modern physical science, have been groping for centu- 
ries blindly after knowledge which occult philosophy has 
enjoyed in full measure all the while.” The author tells us 
that he has come in contact with persons who are heirs of a 
greater knowledge concerning the mysteries of Nature and 
humanity than modern culture has yet evolved.” He admits, 
indeed, that “ modern science has accomplished grand results 
by the open method of investigation. Yet he tells us that 
secluded Orientals may understand more about electricity 
than Faraday, more about physics than Tyndall,” and that 
“adepts of occultism are capable of exhibiting results that 
prove them immeasurably further advanced than ordinary 
modern science in a comprehension of the forces of Nature,” 
though all the time “ physical science has merely been an 
object for occultism of secondary importance.” These as- 
sertions of the superiority of Oriental Science may be in 
accordance with facts or they may not, the data for a decision 
being wanting. But in order to show the manner in which 
our ordinary open science is judged in the work before us, the 
reader must be introduced to an adept of high rank in the 
Occult Brotherhood-— Root Hoomi Lai Singh. This gentle- 
man is apparently a Sikh by birth. In his youth he was 
sent to Europe “ to be educated in Western knowledge, and 
since then has been fully initiated in the greater knowledge 
of the East.” Several of his letters are given in full, and 
their contents seem to be endorsed by Mr. Sinnett as the 
authoritative teachings of Occultism. Among the first points 
which strike us are certain plain misconceptions as regards 
the history and the teachings of open science, which come 
with scant grace in a treatise where such science is spoken 
of with undisguised contempt. Thus we read (p. 96), — 
“ Experimental knowledge does not quite date from 1662, 
when Bacon, Robert Boyle, and the Bishop of Chester 
transformed, under the royal charter, their 4 invisible college’ 
into a society for the promotion of experimental science.” 
Surely it is well known that Bacon was dead prior not only 
to the incorporation of the Royal Society in 1663, but even 
to its private formation in 1645. What is of much more 
importance, no one in Europe supposes that experimental 
open science took its rise at so recent a date. Without 
referring to the comparatively modern researches of Torri- 
celli, Gilbert, and others, we may point to the Book of the 
Balance of Wisdom, which shows that in the twelfth century 
