London Lectures of 1907 by Annie Besant (books to read for beginners txt) 📖

of the world. A part of our work, it seems to me, that lies before us in the coming time, is to help the world to walk wisely along those roads of research on which it has entered now. You cannot prevent it going forward along them, knowledge is already too widely spread for that; but what you can do is to help men to walk wisely, and to avoid many a pitfall into which otherwise they would be very likely to fall. And along those lines there is very much to be done: plans to be worked out, methods of research to be planned and tested; and I hope before very long to see some groups in our Society that will take up this special line of work as part of their activities, and, headed by someone who knows practically something of that with which he is dealing, will then help the younger students to learn wisely and to experiment carefully. And in these matters it is well, so far as you can, to bring the more scientific members of the Society into touch with this work; for one of the reasons that Spiritualism fell into discredit for a time was because the scientific and the thoughtful abstained from it, and left it in the hands of the credulous and the unwise. The leaders of the scientific world who ought to have joined in the work which Sir William Crookes, Alfred Wallace, and others began, instead of following them and strengthening their hands, turned their backs on it all, leaving it to be carried on by those who knew far less than they, and who were not accustomed to accurate observation and careful recording of phenomena. Now leading scientific men are beginning to work at it. Along all lines of psychical research work should be done by us, if we do not mean to cancel the Third Object in our Society.

Thus, then, a great field of work opens out before us, so wide a field, so great, that you would have no need to ask for work if you would only begin to labor along these lines. And take that other line about which Mrs. Cooper Oakley spoke--the line of Historical Research into Mysticism. Has it ever struck you how much of the work of our forerunners remains unknown, because their work is not scanned by sympathetic eyes? How many of the pioneers in the past centuries lie under a heap of calumny, because none has tried to understand, none has tried to realise, the nature of their work? Men like Paracelsus, Cagliostro, and many another whose name I might mention, who are crying out, as it were, for research, and thought, and labor on mystical and occult lines. There again I have good hope that some really efficient work will be going on; for to my mind one of the purposes for which our Presidency should exist is to act as a centre round which every country may gather together, and thus communicate with each other, and form bodies scattered all over the world for mutual aid. The strength of our Society is in that unity of thought, which can only be brought about as one part of the Society realises that other parts are linked with it, as it ought to be, by the President of the whole. For the Presidency would be an idle show, if it is not to be a centre for inspiration and labor. The great work done by the late President is, as I have said elsewhere, practically complete; he has given the Theosophical Society an organisation by which it can work and live; ours to use the organisation that he made, ours to employ this splendid instrument which is now in our hands for world-wide labor and for world-wide helping. That is the work to which I would summon you now, and pray your help. Let us not stand apart one from the other, and work always along isolated lines; in addition to the isolated work, we should have the combined work; for many often can bring about a result which one cannot do. Take, for instance, the great libraries of Europe, far, far apart. It is very laborious for a person to travel all over Europe and labor alone in them all; but if we had students working in every great library, we should have feeders who would send in to a common centre the result of their work, which could then be shed over the world.

Along those lines the Society will become respected, when it is known for honest and useful work in all departments of human activity. There is no good in glorifying it by words and saying what a splendid thing it is, unless we justify ourselves to the world by the work which we contribute for the world's helping.

In this way, then, I would ask you to look at our great field of work. Laborers are wanted. There is more than work enough for all, and in this work the principle that must guide us is, as we have so often said, freedom of thought, freedom of expression. But let it be understood in the Society, for there is danger of this being forgotten, that there is freedom for those who assert as well as for those who deny; that all alike are free. Those who know have a right to speak, and there should be no outcry against them; those who do not believe have a right to say they do not believe, and there should be no outcry against them because they believe not But there is a danger lest those who believe not should think that they have the only right of speech, and that those who experience have no right to say out that which they know to be true. It is the danger which dogs the steps of Freethought everywhere. You can see it in France at the present time, where the Freethinker, smarting against the oppression of the Church, tries to silence the Church, as he has been silenced in the past; but it is a bad reaction, and we cannot have that within the Society--there must be liberty for all. I do not wish to impose my own beliefs on any man or woman in the Society, but I claim the right amongst you to speak the truth I know, and to bear witness to the reality of my Master whom for eighteen years I have served, without being attacked vehemently by those who deny my experience. I know whereof I speak. I ask you not to believe; that is your own choice. I ask you not to accept; that is for you to decide. But you have no right to try to stop my lips, nor to say that the assertion of my belief is outside the liberty allowed in the Theosophical Society. I, as President, will defend to the utmost the right of each to speak his thought--believers and non-believers of every type; but I will not recognise the right of any to impose upon the Society a dogma of unbelief, any more than a dogma of belief. Only by that liberty of all can we live and grow; only by the perfect freedom, and the recognition of every man's right to speak, no matter what he says, can the health of the Society be secured. For in the years that lie before us there is much new knowledge to be gained, many new facts to be discovered, many new experiences to go through, and we must not discourage the seekers and investigators by making it difficult for them to speak amongst us. We need every fact that any human being can bring to us. We have the right to challenge the fact and investigate it, and either to say: "It is fact"; or: "To me it is not fact"; but we have no right to say to any human being: "You shall not search nor speak," for that would be the death-knell of our liberty, that the denial of the foundation on which we stand.

And so let us go forward to a future, I hope, fairer than anything we have in our past. Let us welcome all thought, all refusal of thought, all investigation, all speech, however different it may be from our own speech and thought, and doing this with full respect of each for each, full recognition that minds are different, and that each mind has its own sphere in which it can do useful work for all, let us encourage in our Society every school of thought, every form of opinion, every expression of thought which is in a man's mind. And out of all that clash of opinion, out of all that discussion, Truth should come out stronger, richer, larger than ever. And never mind if sometimes falsehoods are spoken; never mind if sometimes mistakes are made. An old scripture says: "Truth conquers, not falsehood"; for God is Truth, and nothing that is not drawn from His Life can live, nothing that is drawn from His life can die; and realising that, we can go forward fearlessly into the unknown future, sure that to brave hearts and true lives every experience, every failure, every mistake, is only another rung of the ladder by which we climb from ignorance into knowledge, from the bondage of matter into the liberty of Spirit.

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Publication Date: 08-26-2010

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