Ralph Shirley, Editor of the Occult Review[1]
IT is with great regret—a regret that will be shared, I am sure, by all readers of the Occult Review—that I have to record the passing over, on August 7, in his seventy-fourth year, of the celebrated Austrian physician and occultist, Dr. Franz Hartmann, at Kempten, in Southern Bavaria. From its very first publication, Dr. Hartmann was a contributor to the Occult Review and in my editorial capacity I was in correspondence with him up to a week or two before his death. Dr. Franz Hartmann was the son of Dr. Carl Hartmann, a well-known and prominent physician, and his mother, Elizabeth von Stack, was of Irish extraction. Her ancestors claimed descent from the old Irish kings of Ulster. Dr. Hartmann, as is well known, shared the widely-held Theosophical views on the subject of reincarnation, and liked to think that he himself had lived in Ireland in a previous incarnation. He justified this belief by the familiarity with which many Irish scenes struck him on his visit to that country, and also by his recollection of events in the history of Ireland with which he claimed he had no conscious knowledge by normal means.
Dr. Hartmann justified his belief in reincarnation with his usual force and argumentative power :—
A true appreciation and understanding of the essential nature of man will show that the repeated reincarnation of the human monad in successive personalities is a scientific necessity. How could it be possible for a man to develop into a state of perfection, if the time of his spiritual growth were restricted to the period of one short existence upon this globe? If he could go on and develop without having a physical body, then why should it have been necessary for him to take a physical body at all? It is unreasonable to suppose that the spiritual germ of a man begins its existence at the time of the birth of the physical body, or that the physical parents of the child could be the generators of the spiritual monad. If the spiritual monad existed before the body was born, and could develop without it, what would be the use of its entering any body at all?
Dr. Hartmann’s mother’s family, the von Stacks, emigrated to France after the execution of Charles I, and crossed from France to Bavaria at the time of the French Revolution. It was at Kempten, the place of his death, where he received his early education, his parents having moved there when he was only one year old. Dr. Hartmann’s grandfather, it may be interesting to note, was an officer in the French Army under Napoleon I, and fought in the disastrous Russian Campaign. Admirers of R. L. Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mt. Hyde will be interested to learn that in his earliest youth the future occultist regarded himself as of dual personality, and would speak of himself when a boy in two distinct characters. One was a dreamer and idealist, while the other was very obstinate and self-willed and ready to perpetrate all sorts of reprehensible tricks. Dr. Hartmann passed through various stages of religious and philosophical belief. In his early years he was greatly attracted to the doctrines and ritual of the Roman Catholic Church, which appealed to his love of the supersensual and the mysterious. Later on, his religious doubts grew in strength, and a youthful comrade with strong materialistic leanings, induced him to adopt, to a great extent, his own standpoint. By degrees he sank into that state of total agnosticism which was so prevalent at the time. Dr. Hartmann’s life was full of adventure and incident and much of it was passed on the American Continent. Eventually he fell in, as is well known, with the celebrated Madame Blavatsky, and joined forces with the Theosophical Movement, in connection with which he remained to the end of his life, though taking always a very independent view, and forming his own opinions on the evidence which came to his hand on matters of occultism, and the problems of a future life.
Dr. Hartmann, as is well known, wrote various books on occult subjects, the most noteworthy being Magic, White and Black; Paracelsus; An Adventure among the Rosicrucians; The Secret Symbols of the Rosicrucians; Jehoshua, the Life of the Prophet of Nazareth; and The Principles of Astrological Geomancy. A new edition of this last book will be issued by the publishers of the Occult Review during the current month. Of these books, perhaps the two most remarkable are Magic, White and Black and The Life of Paracelsus, embodying as they do the occult philosophy of the author, and his scientific and philosophical outlook. Students of occult phenomena could have no better introductory textbook than Magic, White and Black, or, as it is called perhaps more appropriately in its sub-title, The Science of Finite and Infinite Life. The student of Magic will not, perhaps, find information of the nature he expects in this volume; but for those who contemplate studying or practising magical phenomena, no primer could be more requisite. The work, in effect, puts before the reader the first principles on which the philosophy of Occultism rests, and its justification as a guide in life. As the author states, it was written to prove that spiritual powers must be developed before they can be exercised, and to explain the conditions necessary for this development. The neophyte who would study Magic aims at the exercise of spiritual powers which he does not yet possess because he has not learned the only way in which they can be developed. Such powers exist, indeed, in latent form in every human being.
Nature (says Dr. Hartmann) is a magician. Every plant, animal, and every man is a magician who uses his powers unconsciously and instinctively to build up his own organism. In other words every living being is an organism in which the magic power of the Spirit of Nature acts. If a man should attain the knowledge of how to control this power of Life and to employ it consciously instead of merely submitting unconsciously to its influence, he would become a magician, and could control the processes of life in his own organism, and possibly in that of others as well.
Magic is a question of controlling the spiritual forces whose action is the manifestation of a universal spiritual law. These forces are employed unconsciously by every one, but mankind generally are merely passive agents acting automatically under Nature’s law. Without self-mastery and the understanding of this law, no one can be an occultist, however much he may become the instrument of occult agencies. Thus, argues Dr. Hartmann, if a man could control the universal power of life acting within himself, he might prolong the life of his organism indefinitely. Physical Science is admittedly superficial. “It deals only with forms, and forms are continually changing. To discover causes which are in themselves the effects of unknown primal causes is only to evade one difficulty by substituting another. Science describes the attributes of things, but the first causes which brought these attributes into existence are unknown to her and will remain so until her powers of perception shall penetrate into the Unseen.”
To Dr. Hartmann the only true religion was the religion of Universal Love—the Love that is the recognition by man of his own Divine, Universal Self. “If a person quarrels with another,” he argued, “on the subject of religious opinions, he cannot have the true religion, nor can he have any true knowledge; because true religion is the realization of Truth. The Truth can only be one and never changes, but we change, and as we change, so our aspect of the Truth changes with us.” The various religious systems of the world are all (he held) the natural outgrowth of man’s spiritual evolution.” All Religions are branches of the same tree, and a manifestation of the same Truth. In one place the Sun induces the growth of palms, in another of mushrooms, but there is only one Sun in the system.” The processes of the physical plane have their analogies in the Spiritual World; for there is only one Nature and only one Law.
Dr. Hartmann had little sympathy with the Hermit who would evolve spiritual powers, in isolation from the rest of mankind. “To accomplish the task of becoming spiritual (he writes) it is not necessary to be a misanthrope and to retire into a jungle and there feed on the products of one’s own morbid imagination.” The struggle caused by the petty annoyances of everyday life is the best school in which to exercise the will power for those who have not yet gained the mastery over their self. To take no interest in the welfare of humanity, to avoid the duties of life and to neglect one’s family, would accomplish the very reverse of what is required for spiritual attainment. It would, in fact, increase the love of self, which is the greatest obstacle to such an aim, and would cause the soul to shrink to a smaller focus instead of expanding and amplifying its powers. The ideal to be reached is not this, but rather that of the
Little Child with heart so large
it takes the whole world in.
As the Master said, the Love of God and the Love of Man are one and the same—“Man cannot love God whom he hath not seen, if he has not first learned to love his neighbour, whom he hath seen.” He cannot, in short, attain the spiritual except through the way of self-sacrifice on the altar of humanity. To renounce oneself means to conquer the sense of personality and thus to become superior to the love of those things which the personality desires.
By forgetting our personal selves (writes Hartmann), we begin to look upon these selves not as permanent, unchanging and unchangeable entities, standing isolated among other isolated entities and separated from them by impenetrable shells, but as manifestations of an Infinite Power which embraces the universe and whose powers are centred and brought to a focus in the bodies which we temporarily inhabit, those bodies into which continually flow and from which are incessantly radiating the rays of an infinite sphere of light, whose circumference is endless and whose centre is everywhere. . . . All our popular religious sects are based upon selfish considerations. Each of our religious sectarians speculates how to obtain some spiritual, if not material, benefit for himself. Each wants to be saved by somebody—first himself, then perhaps the others, but above all himself. The true religion of Universal Love knows no self.
Dr. Hartmann’s was an essentially sane Occultism, as only true Occultism is. To become spiritual, he wrote, physical health, intellectual growth and spiritual activity should go hand in hand. Intuition should be supported by an unselfish intellect, a pure mind by a healthy form. This sanity of intellect did not exclude a philosophic attitude nearly akin to that of Berkeley. No one grasped more fully the relativity of all experience.
Everything (he writes) is either a reality or delusion according to the standpoint from which We view it. The words “real” and “unreal” are only relative terms, and what may seem real in one state of existence appears unreal in another. Money, love, power, etc., appear very real to those who need them. To those who have outgrown the necessity for their possession they are only illusions. That which we realize is real to us, however unreal it may be to another. . . . Everything that exists exists in the universal mind and if the individual mind becomes conscious of its relation to a thing therein it begins to perceive it. No man can realize a thing beyond his experience. He cannot know anything to which he stands in no relation. . . . Space, extension, duration, are relative. Their qualities change according to our standpoint or measurement, and according to our mode of perception. To an animalcule in a drop of water that drop may appear as an ocean, and to an insect living on a leaf that leaf may constitute a world. If during our sleep the whole of the visible world were to shrink to the size of a walnut or expand to a thousand times its present dimensions, on awaking we should perceive no change, provided that change had equally affected everything, including ourselves. As our conception of space is only relative so is our conception of time. It is not time itself, but its measurement of which we are conscious; and time is nothing to us unless in connection with our association of ideas.
Dr. Hartmann did not believe in the action of mind on mind by any purely spiritual means. He held, as I think, quite rightly, that in order for one mind to convey an impression to another, thought wave must travel through some physical medium. “According to the usual definition (he observes) mind is the intellectual power in man, and as man means a visible body, this definition makes of mind something confined within that visible form. But if this conception were true there could be no transmission of will to a distance and no transmission of thought. No sound can be heard in a space from which the air has been exhausted. No thought can travel from one individual to another without a corresponding ether existing between them.” It is noteworthy that this is not the view taken by Sir William Barrett who, while admitting that the discovery of wireless telegraphy has to very many minds rendered telepathy far more credible, argues that as a matter of fact the two phenomena have no relation to each other. “How telepathy is propagated (he writes) we have not the remotest idea. Certainly, it is not likely to be through any material medium or by any physical agency known to us.” The learned Professor’s arguments have a certain apparent cogency and undoubtedly they call for a reply.
Even (he says) if we assume the so-called brain waves to be infinitely minute waves in the ether that fills all space, they would still obey what is called the “Law of Inverse Squares”; i.e., spreading on every side in ever-expanding waves, they would decay in proportion to the square of the distance from their source. Hence to transmit waves over great distances through free space requires tremendous energy in the originating source of these waves; otherwise they would become so enfeebled when they reached the receiver that it could not detect them.
Starting from this position he argues that the mental energy emanating from a dying person which would enable him to transmit a mental impression from himself to a friend on the other side of the globe would be so tremendous (assuming an analogy with wireless telegraphy) that it must be regarded as an utter impossibility. It is worthy of note that it would also follow on this argument that the nearer the two people who are in telepathic communication might be, the greater would be the probability of their receiving and transmitting messages one to the other. It is, I think, worthy of note that certain experiments conducted by the Society for Psychical Research, notably those between Miss Miles and Miss Ramsden, seem rather to bear out this position. Apparently when the distance was less between them, communication was easier. It may, of course, be argued that in the case of the dying man communicating with his friend at the other end of the world, his thought form actually traverses space and goes to visit his friend, and that telepathy as ordinarily understood would he impossible at so great a distance. Mrs. Besant, in her book on Thought Power: its Control and Culture, distinguishes two methods of thought transference, one which she describes as physical—the ordinary telepathy—and the other as psychical: one belonging to the brain and mind as well, the other to the mind alone.” In the second method of thought transference (she says) the Thinker, having created a thought form on his own plane, does not send it down to the brain, but directs it immediately to another thinker on the mental place [plane?].” Presumably this second method implies what I have suggested above, the idea of the thought form travelling through space.
There are those who will accuse Dr. Hartmann of being over- credulous and too ready to accept fables as scientific truths. His views on magical metathesis, the transfer of individuals from one place to another by occult means, will be familiar to readers of this Review, and there will doubtless be many even among professing occultists who would hesitate to accept so bold an hypothesis; But there are facts in evidence which are inexplicable on any theory that has been yet advanced excepting this. Dr. Hartmann’s belief in Spirits of Nature—Undines, Sylphs, Salamanders, Gnomes—may also be called into question, and it is a subject on which I should be unwilling to express any personal opinion. The learned doctor had absorbed this among many other beliefs of the celebrated Paracelsus. The fact is, that the student of such subjects finds himself compelled to admit the reality of so many phenomena which have been scouted by Science that it is a matter of the utmost difficulty to know where to draw the line between the true and the false, the old lines of demarcation, which the self-sufficient Science of the nineteenth century so confidently drew, having now become hopelessly obliterated. However the truth of these things may be, in reading Dr. Hartmann’s works the conviction is borne in upon me ever more and more that, despite many possible errors on specific points, the present age has seen no master mind endowed with a wider or more philosophic outlook, or with a more penetrating insight into the mysteries of natural law.
Notes:
[1] Obituary. Franz Hartmann, M.D. By Editor, Ralph Shirley. Occult Review 16, no. 3 (September 1912), 121-127. {This article was reformatted from the original, but with the content unchanged, other than leaving out the Editor’s inset text boxes, by Robert Hutwohl, ©2025}