“ANNIE BESANT.”

Theosophy, as its students well know, so far from involving Dualism, is based on the One, which becomes Two on manifestation, just as Atheism posits one existence, only cognisable in the duality force and matter, and as philosophic—­though not popular—­Theism teaches one Deity whereof are spirit and matter.  Mr. Bradlaugh’s temperate disapproval was not copied in its temperance by some other Freethought leaders, and Mr. Foote especially distinguished himself by the bitterness of his attacks.  In the midst of the whirl I was called away to Paris to attend, with Herbert Burrows, the great Labour Congress held there from July 15th to July 20th, and spent a day or two at Fontainebleau with H.P.  Blavatsky, who had gone abroad for a few weeks’ rest.  There I found her translating the wonderful fragments from “The Book of the Golden Precepts,” now so widely known under the name of “The Voice of the Silence.”  She wrote it swiftly, without any material copy before her, and in the evening made me read it aloud to see if the “English was decent.”  Herbert Burrows was there, and Mrs. Candler, a staunch American Theosophist, and we sat round H.P.B. while I read.  The translation was in perfect and beautiful English, flowing and musical; only a word or two could we find to alter, and she looked at us like a startled child, wondering at our praises—­praises that any one with the literary sense would endorse if they read that exquisite prose poem.

A little earlier in the same day I had asked her as to the agencies at work in producing the taps so constantly heard at Spiritualistic Seances.  “You don’t use spirits to produce taps,” she said; “see here.”  She put her hand over my head, not touching it, and I heard and felt slight taps on the bone of my skull, each sending a little electric thrill down the spine.  She then carefully explained how such taps were producible at any point desired by the operator, and how interplay of the currents to which they were due might be caused otherwise than by conscious human volition.  It was in this fashion that she would illustrate her verbal teachings, proving by experiment the statements made as to the existence of subtle forces controllable by the trained mind.  The phenomena all belonged to the scientific side of her teaching, and she never committed the folly of claiming authority for her philosophic doctrines on the ground that she was a wonder-worker.  And constantly she would remind us that there was no such thing as “miracle”; that all the phenomena she had produced were worked by virtue of a knowledge of nature deeper than that of average people, and by the force of a well-trained mind and will; some of them were what she would describe as “psychological tricks,” the creation of images by force of imagination, and in pressing them on others as a “collective hallucination”; others, such as the moving of solid articles, either by an astral hand projected to draw them towards her,