Occultism and Spiritualism

of Spinoza, Newton, Goethe, and Auguste Comte at the end of his life (when his disciples declared him “mad”), not to mention masters of the subject such as Cazotte and Claude de Saint-Martin—this mysticism, which remains closed to criticism and is disdainfully relegated to the antechamber of ordinary philosophy, was not made to attract the ardent sympathies of the University.

On the other hand, theology is just as wary of these singular philosophers who mingle prayer with chemical experiments and who convert unbelievers through apparitions or miraculous healings. For the theologian, there is something of the Devil beneath it all. And one endeavors to do them further harm through a few choice calumnies, now that they can no longer be burned thanks to the Holy Inquisition. They are pantheists, it is said; they deny the Divine Personality and confuse it with the whole of Nature, and other such nonsense, which is absolutely false. There are no greater defenders of the Unity of the Divine Personality, outside of Nature and outside of Man, than the occultists; but instead of relegating the Divinity to a metaphysical sphere, they strive to feel Him acting and living within the creation as well as within the creature, without ever confusing His personality with His external virtues.

Occultist philosophy is therefore neither materialistic, nor pantheistic, nor purely mystical: it is spiritualist in the sense that it seeks to determine the preponderance, on all planes, of spirit over matter, but without denying matter any more than spirit. Such is its general character, which its method makes even more striking.

Even more than general theories, the method of occultism allows its adepts to be recognized without possible confusion across the most diverse eras.

A philosopher attached by initiation or by study