Dr. Hartmann Reads the “Postscript.”[1]

     “My dear Judge:—What is the matter? Has the world become struck with blindness, and does the President of the T.S. not know what Theosophy is? Have all the lectures of Mrs. Besant been after all nothing but eloquence mixed with gush? Do our own Theosophical writers only repeat parrot-like what they hear, but without understanding?

     “I ask these questions because I received a letter from Col. Olcott, in which he calls my attention to a certain presidential “postscript” in the April number of the Theosophist, and having-at last sent for that journal, I find that the “postscript” refers to the well-known “Mahâtmâ Message to some Brahmans” published in the Path. It seems almost incredible how anybody, to say nothing of a president-founder, could misconstrue and confound that message so as to understand it to mean that the Brahmans should “repudiate their religious beliefs, cast aside their splendid scriptures, and turn Buddhists!” in other words, that they should give up one orthodox creed for the purpose of assuming another. I never imagined it possible that anybody could not see the plain meaning of that letter to some Brahmans, in which the Master asks them to strive to outgrow their orthodox beliefs and superstitions, faith in gods or a (separate) god, and to attain real knowledge.

     “Great must be the power of Mr. Chakravarti and his orthodox colleagues, if they can spread so much darkness over Adyar. The very air in that place seems to be reeking with envy, jealousy, conceit and above all ingratitude. Persons (such as Hübbe Schleiden) who for many years have been making a living by huckstering the truths they learned from H. P. Blavatsky and trading them off as their own inventions, now turn upon their benefactors like wolves.

     “For years it has been preached and written in all theosophical papers, that blind belief in a doctrine (based upon the supposed respectability of the person who teaches it), is not self knowledge; that we should neither reject a doctrine nor blindly believe it, but strive to attain to the true understanding of it. And now after these many years the cry is heard among the “prominent” members of the T.S.: ‘Where, oh where is a person whose respectability is so much assured, that we may blindly believe what he says and save ourselves the trouble of thinking for ourselves?

     “It seems to me, that the present row in the T.S. is an absolutely necessary test, to show who are and who are not capable of grasping the spirit and essence of theosophy, and to purify the T. S. of those elements incapable of receiving the truth. Let those who need doctrines, be they brahminical or otherwise, depart in peace. Let them rejoice in the conviction of their own superior morality, which is the product of the delusion of self. The true theosophist knows that the condition necessary for the interior revelation of truth is neither the acceptance nor the repudiation of doctrines, nor the belief in the respectability of Peter or John, but the sacrifice of self and that love of the Master which alone forms the link of sympathy between the Master and the disciple, and whose purity consists in being unselfish.

                                                                                  Yours very sincerely,

Hallein, April 25, 1895.                                                                        F. H.”

Note:

[1] Correspondence to the Editor, The Path magazine, by F. H. [Franz Hartmann], Dr. Hartmann Reads the “Postscript.” The Path 10, no. 3 (June 1895), 96-97. Culled by Robert Hutwohl, 2025