Page:Isis very much unveiled - being the story of the great Mahatma hoax (IA b24884273).pdf/111

Rh Except Mr. Old, one prominent Theosophist, and one alone, has so far publicly faced the facts. Mr. Herbert Burrows has had the honesty and the courage to say out that this thing must be answered by Mr. Judge, and fully, or he for one will quit the society. Mr. Burrows forgets that others besides Mr. Judge have made themselves answerable. Other correspondents, again, represented other factions, and showed how the society is seething with distrust and shame. But the mass of the letters only serve to prove that, whatever else the “occult powers” of the Theosophists may be, they do not include a command either of plain English or of straight argument. If “Isis” does not yet stand before us absolutely like Hans Breitmann’s “maiden mit nodings on,” it is a painfully thin fabric of Theosophistries which alone shelters her from the cold wind of public contempt. Jet us examine it.

“After all, you have not proved that Mahatmas do not exist, nor that occult phenomena cannot occur.”

Certainly I have not, nor did I ever propose to try. I am quite prepared to believe in both when evidence for them has been produced, and has stood the test of such ordinary evidential canons as have been applied to kindred subjects—for instance, by the Psychical Research Society. All that I have said is that certain evidence on which the Theosophical Society has been building proves nothing whatever, except the existence of a hotbed of humbug within the society itself. As for the Mahatmas, there is no difficulty about conceiving that illiterate, twaddling, and mendacious beings of a second-rate order of intelligence, such as those reflected in the “missives” which I have reproduced, may exist in Tibet as they unhappily do elsewhere. But when we are told that these beings have acquired powers which rise superior to time and space, and that they use these for communicating “in a quasi-miraculous manner” with the Theosophical Society, we ask for facts; and we get—such facts as were investigated by Dr. Hodgson and his colleagues, and such facts as