It is seldom remembered that, in the years following publication of “The Origin of Species”, HPB was the first person to aggressively argue the case for a transphysical element in evolution against the rising Darwinian consensus. Yet, buried in the sprawling bulk of her two major works (Isis Unveiled, 1877, and The Secret Doctrine, 1888) there lies, in rudimentary form, the first philosophy of psychic and spiritual evolution to appear in the modern West. Her effort, unlike that of the Christian fundamentalists, was not to reject Darwin’s work, but to insist that it had, by its focus on the purely physical, wholly omitted the mental, creative, and visionary life of the human race, in short, it omitted consciousness, whose development followed a very different evolutionary path. Darwin simply did not go far enough; his was not a big enough theory to contain human nature in the round. As HPB put it: “Darwin’s starting point is placed in front of an open door. We are at liberty with him to either remain within, or cross the threshold, beyond which lies the limitless and the incomprehensible.” (“Unfinished Animal”, by Theodore Roszak, Harper & Row Publishers, ©1975 Ch. 6. pg. 118.)

Above all, she is among the modern world’s trailblazing psychologists of the visionary mind. At the same historical moment that Freud, Pavlov, and James had begun to formulate the secularized and materialist theory of mind that has so far dominated modern Western thought, HPB and her fellow Theosophists were rescuing from occult tradition and exoteric religion a forgotten psychology of the superconscious and the extrasensory. (“Unfinished Animal”, by Theodore Roszak, Harper & Row Publishers, ©1975 Ch. 6. pg. 118.)

They also took me on one occasion to the Blavatsky Lodge and introduced me to Madame Blavatsky and Mrs. Besant. ……… I recall having read, at the brothers’ [Keightly brothers] instance, Madame Blavatsky’s Key to Theosophy. This book stimulated in me the desire to read books on Hinduism, and disabused me of the notion fostered by the missionaries that Hinduism was rife with superstition. (The following is from “Gandhi, An Autobiography”, subtitled, ‘The Story of My Experiments With Truth’, pg. 68, Beacon Press, Boston, first paperback edition 1957.)

-Reed Carson, Co-founder of Theosophy Foundation, Inc. and this website: blavatsky.net.

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