Occultism and Spiritualism

...primordial [principles] for deducing the invisible from the visible, it can no more be linked to realism or to positivism on account of its purely mystical flights.

After following Spencer to the point where a pane of glass separates the knowable from the unknowable, the occultist breaks the glass and, thanks to his analogical method, launches himself boldly into this realm unknown to the physical senses of the ordinary man.

This is what makes it difficult for the critic to assign a place to occultism within philosophy. It is clearly a form of Platonism, since Plato personifies the esoteric doctrine of Egypt in the West, and since it was to Plato that initiated Christian philosophers—Gnostics and others—the alchemists, and certain Christian Kabbalists, primarily attached themselves; but the Platonism of the occultists adapts to positive science and to the character of each era with such flexibility that the critic becomes hesitant. It is the same general philosophy, with its characteristic search for the Trinity in Man, in Nature, and in God, and with its horror of materialism as much as of pantheism, that we see appearing in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, in the accounts of Socrates divinized by Plato, as in the epistles of Saint Paul, the Gospel of Saint John, the writings of the Gnostics, and the commentaries of Maimonides and the Jewish and Christian Kabbalists. We find this same philosophy under the guise of Hermeticism among the alchemists, and adapted to astrology by Agrippa, to human and natural physiology by Paracelsus, and to chemistry by Louis Lucas in 1850.

When pure Spiritualism, with its exclusively idealistic tendency, finds itself defeated by experimentalism, it is to occult philosophy that independent seekers will return.

On the other hand, when experimental positivism, with its exclusively materialistic tendency, abruptly collides with the facts of telepathy, of photographic apparition—