those Socialists who have bitterly opposed the promulgation of Neo-Malthusianism—­regarding it as a “red herring intended to draw the attention of the proletariat away from the real cause of poverty, the monopoly of land and capital by a class”—­admit that when society is built on the foundation of common property in all that is necessary for the production of wealth, the time will come for the consideration of the population question.  Nor do I now see, any more than I saw then, how any Materialist can rationally avoid the Neo-Malthusian position.  For if man be the outcome of purely physical causes, it is with these that we must deal in guiding his future evolution.  If he be related but to terrestrial existence, he is but the loftiest organism of earth; and, failing to see his past and his future, how should my eyes not have been then blinded to the deep-lying causes of his present woe?  I brought a material cure to a disease which appeared to me to be of material origin; but how when the evil came from a subtler source, and its causes lay not on the material plane?  How if the remedy only set up new causes for a future evil, and, while immediately a palliative, strengthened the disease itself, and ensured its reappearance in the future?  This was the view of the problem set before me by H.P.  Blavatsky when she unrolled the story of man, told of his origin and his destiny, showed me the forces that went to the making of man, and the true relation between his past, his present, and his future.

For what is man in the light of Theosophy?  He is a spiritual intelligence, eternal and uncreate, treading a vast cycle of human experience, born and reborn on earth millennium after millennium, evolving slowly into the ideal man.  He is not the product of matter, but is encased in matter, and the forms of matter with which he clothes himself are of his own making.  For the intelligence and will of man are creative forces—­not creative ex nihilo, but creative as is the brain of the painter—­and these forces are exercised by man in every act of thought.  Thus he is ever creating round him thought-forms, moulding subtlest matter into shape by these energies, forms which persist as tangible realities when the body of the thinker has long gone back to earth and air and water.  When the time for rebirth into this earth-life comes for the soul these thought-forms, its own progeny, help to form the tenuous model into which the molecules of physical matter are builded for the making of the body, and matter is thus moulded for the new body in which the soul is to dwell, on the lines laid down by the intelligent and volitional life of the previous, or of many previous, incarnations.  So does each man create for himself in verity the form wherein he functions, and what he is in his present is the inevitable outcome of his own creative energies in his past.  Applying this to the Neo-Malthusian theory, we see in sexual love not only a passion which