After saying that the nineteenth-century Englishman would be but too likely to be repelled if he only skimmed the book, I went on:  “With telescope and with microscope, with scalpel and with battery, Western Science interrogates nature, adding fact to fact, storing experience after experience, but coming ever to gulfs unfathomable by its plummets, to heights unscalable by its ladders.  Wide and masterful in its answers to the ‘How?’ the ‘Why?’ ever eludes it, and causes remain enwrapped in gloom.  Eastern Science uses as its scientific instrument the penetrating faculties of the mind alone, and regarding the material plane as Maya—­illusion—­seeks in the mental and spiritual planes of being the causes of the material effects.  There, too, is the only reality; there the true existence of which the visible universe is but the shadow.

“It is clear that from such investigations some further mental equipment is necessary than that normally afforded by the human body.  And here comes the parting of the ways between East and West.  For the study of the material universe, our five senses, aided by the instruments invented by Science, may suffice.  For all we can hear and see, taste and handle, these accustomed servitors, though often blundering, are the best available guides to knowledge.  But it lies in the nature of the case that they are useless when the investigation is to be into modes of existence which cannot impress themselves on our nerve-ends.  For instance, what we know as colour is the vibration frequency of etheric waves striking on the retina of the eye, between certain definite limits—­759 trillions of blows from the maximum, 436 trillions from the minimum—­these waves give rise in us to the sensation which the brain translates into colour. (Why the 436 trillion blows at one end of a nerve become ‘Red’ at the other end we do not know; we chronicle the fact but cannot explain it.) But our capacity to respond to the vibration cannot limit the vibrational capacity of the ether; to us the higher and lower rates of vibration do not exist, but if our sense of vision were more sensitive we should see where now we are blind.  Following this line of thought we realise that matter may exist in forms unknown to us, in modifications to which our senses are unable to respond.  Now steps in the Eastern Sage and says:  ’That which you say may be, is; we have developed and cultivated senses as much superior to yours as your eye is superior to that of the jelly-fish; we have evolved mental and spiritual faculties which enable us to investigate on the higher planes of being with as much certainty as you are investigating on the physical plane; there is nothing supernatural in the business, any more than your knowledge is supernatural, though much above that accessible to the fish; we do not speculate on these higher forms of existence; we know them by personal study, just as you know the fauna and flora of your world.  The powers