Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/135

Rh grades of matter, the deficit arising on the latter would be vastly greater than that shown by the general balance sheet. Again, could newspaper matter paying only a cent a pound in bulk be separated from matter paying one cent per ounce, one cent per two ounces, and one cent per four ounces, it would still more clearly be seen at what an enormous loss the conveying of newspapers at the rate mentioned is carried on. It is too bad that people should be imposed on in this way; they support a paper specially to defend their interests, and it does so by feeding them with sophistry and misinformation. That is not the way to bring on the millennium.

the August number of the Nineteenth Century a leading theosophist writer, Mr. A. P. Sinnett, undertakes to explain to us by an analogy the position of superiority which persons who are theosophically enlightened enjoy with reference to those who use only their ordinary senses and faculties. Conceive, he says, that mankind at large, while sensitive to light and shade, possessed no sense for color, but that a certain number of individuals were endowed with such a sense: the result would be that the latter would be regarded by the great majority "as guilty (to say the least) of a very gross affectation in professing to regard the tints of a flower as more agreeable to the eye than the color of a lump of clay." If the color-distinguishing minority were to go a step further and profess to be able to distinguish claret from sherry by simply looking at them, they would offend, we are told, still more deeply the common sense of the majority and would create doubt "as to the healthiness of their understanding."

It is indeed, we must confess, very difficult to have full confidence in the healthiness of the understanding of a writer who tries to palm off upon us an argument of this kind. In the case supposed the persons possessing the more-developed faculty would demonstrate every day of life, and in matters coming within the cognizance of all, that they had a definite power not possessed by men in general; and, instead of offending the common sense of the majority, they would be in high honor, and would have their choice of lucrative employments. But if these persons merely professed to have a sense, and now made a hit and now a miss, but far more often a miss than a hit in the pretended application of it, and if they charged money for their exercises in guess work they would make some dupes, but they would certainly offend both the common sense and the common honesty of right-thinking people. We venture to say in the most positive manner that theosophists can do nothing whatever parallel, in the world as it is to-day, to the distinguishing of colors in a color-blind community. If they can, tests can be made anywhere and everywhere, before any class of persons, with equal and unvarying success. The person who could distinguish claret from sherry by the color could go on doing it all day long, and it would not matter in the least to him before whom he exercised the power. He would do it so infallibly, so unvaryingly, and under such every-day conditions, that the non-recognition of his possession of a special faculty would be out of the question. But is there any theosophist to-day who, as theosophist, can claim to be able so much as to play an unvaryingly successful game of poker, to take a most familiar, and we hope not too vulgar, illustration? If there is, a grand career is open to him in some of our social circles. But Mr. Sinnett makes no such claim for his co-religionists. He goes no further than to say that, "although still a minority as compared with the whole, those persons who exercise what occult students generally call the 'astral