“Who knows from whence this great creation sprang?  Whether his will
     created or was mute.  He knows it—­or perchance even He knows not.”

Or, again, he accepts the Vedantic conception of Brahma, who, in the Upanishads, is represented as “without life, without mind, pure,” unconscious, for Brahma is “Absolute Consciousness.”  Or, even finally, siding with the Svabhavikas of Nepaul, maintains that nothing exists but “Svabhavat” (substance or nature) which exists by itself without any creator—­he is the true follower of pure and absolute Theosophy.  That Theosophy which prompted such men as Hegel, Fichte and Spinoza to take up the labours of the old Grecian philosophers and speculate upon the One Substance—­the Deity, the Divine All proceeding from the Divine Wisdom—­incomprehensible, unknown and unnamed by any ancient or modern religious philosophy, with the exception of Judaism, including Christianity and Mohammedanism.  Every Theosophist, then, holding to a theory of the Deity “which has not revelation but an inspiration of his own for its basis,” may accept any of the above definitions or belong to any of these religions, and yet remain strictly within the boundaries of Theosophy.  For the latter is belief in the Deity as the all, the source of all existence, the infinite that cannot be either comprehended or known, the universe alone revealing It, or, as some prefer it, Him, thus giving a sex to that, to anthropomorphize which is blasphemy.  True Theosophy shrinks from brutal materialization; it prefers believing that, from eternity retired within itself, the Spirit of the Deity neither wills nor creates; but from the infinite effulgence everywhere going forth from the Great Centre, that which produces all visible and invisible things is but a ray containing in itself the generative and conceptive power, which, in its turn, produces that which the Greeks called Macrocosm, the Kabalists Tikkun or Adam Kadmon, the archetypal man, and the Aryans Purusha, the manifested Brahm, or the Divine Male.  Theosophy believes also in the Anastasis, or continued existence, and in transmigration (evolution) or a series of changes of the personal ego, which can be defended and explained on strict philosophical principles by making a distinction between Paramatma (transcendental, supreme spirit) and Jivatma (individual spirit) of the Vedantins.

To fully define Theosophy, we must consider it under all its aspects.  The interior world has not been hidden from all by impenetrable darkness.  By that higher intuition acquired by Theosophia, or God-knowledge, which carries the mind from the world of form into that of formless spirit, man has been sometimes enabled, in every age and every country, to perceive things in the interior or invisible world.  Hence, the “Samadhi,” or Dhyan Yog Samadhi, of the Hindu ascetics; the “Daimonlonphoti,” or spiritual illumination of the Neo-Platonists; the “sidereal confabulation of soul,” of the