Fourth Lecture

When considering a phenomenon such as Blavatsky, especially when considering it from the aspect that will be clear to you from the remarks of the last three days, the first consideration naturally is the personality as such, regarded so-to-speak simply for itself, on the one hand. On the other hand, one has to consider it in the aspect of a means, by which a certain effect was produced upon a large number of people. Well, this effect was in part certainly one of a very negative kind. Those people, one may say, who heard anything of Blavatsky's publications, in so far as they were people, say of a philosophic or psychologic turn of mind, or literary, or scientific, or what one might call in general ‘educated’, as the term is used to-day,—such people were only too glad to be rid in any way of this new apparition, and not to be obliged to pronounce any sort of judgment on it. And they could attain this aim of theirs all the better, that there were circumstances, which I touched upon yesterday, under which they could say: It was a proven fact that there had been bogus practices, and one needn't trouble one's head further about anything, where this kind of thing is said to have been evidenced.