Page 5 (part 8)

It is the hunger and thirst after sanctity and the overfilling of the soul therewith. The word clairvoyance brings me to the last point and to the third distinction which I have promised to mention. The office of occultism is of course comparable to the empirical science of the psychic side of things which is being followed at the present day with circumspection and keenness all over Europe and America. It is a poor compliment in one way to institute the comparison, because that which has passed through the alembics of occultism is the dregs and lees of thought, intelligence, motive, and of all that goes to make up the side of action in man. Psychical research, on the other hand, has throughout been actuated by an honourable--often by a pious--motive; it has adopted a scientific method, so far as the subject would permit; it has put forth no claims and abides judgment by results. It is of course, from my point of view, very far from the term. I do not believe for one moment that anything responds to its methods from the unseen side of things which can bring good to man by the intercourse. But it has to be remembered that every supramundane or abnormal fact which is registered by this kind of research is so much evidence added to the dossier of occult science. If the phenomena of psychism are as psychical research has registered, the old processes of Magic may be unquestionably veridic processes within their own lines. They did not put the operator in communion, on the highest supposition, with Raphael, Gabriel and Uriel, or with Astaroth and Belial and Lucifer, on the lowest, any more than psychical research and spiritism have ever established intercourse with the souls of the faithful departed. But both have produced the extraordinary pathological condition and the phenomena of the soul manifesting. The distinction between the two methods is that one was usually the result of personally induced hallucinations, complicated by the frequent intervention of abnormal psychic facts-the whole following a more or less maniac ceremonial--while the other is the scientific investigation of similar and analogical states in predisposed subjects whom the operator may seek to control. I have no reason to suppose that the sober, ordered and well-judged methods of such experimental research will succeed in taking the subject into any grade of certitude which will be of permanent value to man, and the question closes here so far as I am concerned. The indications--such as they are--gather rather on the other side. The path of certitude is in the inward man, as it stands to all reason that it must be, if God and His Kingdom are within. There is thus, on the best and most temperate hypothesis, no object in going towards any other direction than thither wherein is contained the All. Two things only now remain to be said: It will be seen, in the first place, that from that part of the Secret Tradition in Christian Times, with the summary details of which I opened the present conference, there could have never been any derivation to occult tradition and so-called occult science. In the second place, the work which hereafter and now follows shall permit the Rituals of White and Black Magic to speak for themselves as to the tradition therein and its value.