Why I became a theosophist / by Annie Besant.

  • Besant, Annie, 1847-1933.
Date:
1889
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Why I became a theosophist / by Annie Besant. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    position assumed by some of my critics is to set up a new infallibility, as indefensible, and less venerable, than that of Borne. It is to claim that tbe summit of human know¬ ledge has been reached by them, and that all new know¬ ledge is folly. It is to do what Churches in all ages have done, to set up their own petty fences round the field of truth, and in so doing to trace the limits of their own cemeteries. And for the Freethinker to do this is to be false to his creed, and to stain himself with the most flagrant inconsistency; he denounces the immovability of the Church as obstinacy, while he glorifies the immovability of the Freethinker as strength; he blames the one because it shuts its ears against his new truth, and then promptly shuts his own ears against new truth from some one else. Let us distinguish; there is a vacillation of opinion which is a sign of mental weakness, a change which is a turning back. When all the available evidence for a doctrine has been examined, and the doctrine thereupon has been rejected, it shows a mental fault somewhere if that doctrine be again accepted, the evidence remaining the same. It does not, on the other hand, imply any mental weakness, if, on the bringing forward of new evidence which supplies the lacking demonstration, the doctrine previously rejected for lack of such evidence, be accepted. Nor does it imply mental weakness if a doctrine accepted on certain given evidence, be later given up on additions being made to knowledge. Only in this way is intellectual progress made; only thus, step by step, do we approach the far-off: Truth. A Freethinker, who has become one by study and has painfully wrought out his freedom, discarding the various doctrines of Christianity, could not rebelieve them without confessing either that he had been hasty in his rejection or was insecure in his new adhesion; in either case he would have shown intellectual weakness. But not to the Freethinker can be closed any new fields of mental discovery; not on his limbs shall be welded the fresh fetters of a new orthodoxy, after he has hewn off the links of the elder faith; not round his eyes facing the sunshine, shall be bound the bandage of a cramping creed; not to him shall Atheism, any more than Theism, say: “ Thus far shalt thou think, and no further ”. Atheism has been his deliverer; it must never be his gaoler: it has freed him; it must never tie him down.