By the bye, my good Brother, I have not hitherto suspected in you such a capacity for defending and excusing the inexcusable as exhibited by you in my defence, of the now famous "exercise of ingenuity." If the article (reply to C. C. Massey) has been written in the spirit you attribute to me in your letter; and if I, or any one of us has "an inclination to tolerate subtler and more tricksy ways of pursuing an end" than generally admitted as honourable by the truth-loving, straight-forward European (is Mr. Hume included in this category?) — indeed you have no right to excuse such a mode of dealing, even in me; nor to view it "merely in the nature of spots in the sun," since a spot is a spot whether found in the bright luminary or upon a brass candlestick. But you are mistaken, my dear friend. There was no subtle, no tricky mode of dealing, to get her out of the difficulty created by her ambiguous style and ignorance of English, not her ignorance of the subject — which is not the same thing and alters entirely the question. Nor was I ignorant of the fact that M. had written to you previously upon the subject, since it was in one of his letters (the last but one before I took the business off his hands) in which he touched upon the subject of "races" for the first [time] and spoke of reincarnations. If M. told you to beware trusting Isis too implicitly, it was because he was teaching you truth and fact — and that at the time the passage was written we had not yet decided upon teaching the public indiscriminately. He gave you several such instances — if you will but re-read his letter — adding that were such and such sentences written in such a way they would explain facts now merely hinted upon, far better.
Of course "to C.C.M." the passage must seem wrong and contradictory for it is "misleading" as M. said. Many are the subjects treated upon in Isis that even H.P.B. was not allowed to become thoroughly acquainted with; yet they are not contradictory if — "misleading." To make her say — as she was made by me to say — that the passage criticized was "incomplete, chaotic, vague . . . clumsy as many more passages in that work" was a sufficiently "frank admission" I should think, to satisfy the most crotchetty critic. To admit "that the passage was wrong," on the other hand, would have amounted to a useless falsehood, for I maintain that it is not wrong; since if it conceals the whole truth, it does not distort it in the fragments of that truth as given in Isis. The point in C. C. M.'s complaining criticism was not that the whole truth had not been given, but that the truth and facts of 1877 were represented as errors and contradicted in 1882; and it was that point — damaging for the whole Society, its "lay" and inner chelas, and for our doctrine — that had to be shown under its true colours; namely that of an entire misconception due to the fact that the "septenary" doctrine had not yet been divulged to the world at the time when Isis was written. And thus it was shown. I am sorry you do not find her answer written under my direct inspiration "very satisfactory," for it proves to me only that up to this you have not yet grasped very firmly the difference between the sixth and seventh and the fifth, or the immortal and the astral or personal "Monads = Egos." The suspicion is corroborated by what H — X gives in his criticism of my explanation at the end of his "letter" in the September number; your letter before me completing the evidence thereupon. No doubt the "real Ego inheres in the higher principles which are reincarnated" periodically every one, two, or three or more thousands of years. But the immortal Ego the "Individual Monad," is not the personal monad which is the 5th; and the passage in Isis did not answer Eastern reincarnationists, who maintain in that same Isis — had you but read the whole of it — that the individuality or the immortal "Ego" has to re-appear in every cycle — but the Western, especially the French reincarnationists, who teach that it is the personal, or astral monad, the "moi fluidique" the manas, or the intellectual mind, the 5th principle in short, that is reincarnated each time. Thus, if you read once more C.C.M.'s quoted passage from Isis against the "Reviewer of the Perfect Way," you will perhaps find that H.P.B. and myself were perfectly right in maintaining that in the above passage only the "astral monad" was meant. And there is a far more "unsatisfactory shock," to my mind, upon finding that you refuse to recognise in the astral monad the personal Ego — whereas, all of us call it most undoubtedly by that name, and have so called it for millenniums — than there could ever be in yours when meeting with that monad under its proper name in E. Levi's Fragment on Death!
The "astral monad" is the "personal Ego," and therefore, it never reincarnates, as the French Spirites will have it, but under "exceptional circumstances;" in which case, reincarnating, it does not become a shell but, if successful in its second reincarnation will become one, and then gradually lose its personality, after being so to say emptied of its best and highest spiritual attributes by the immortal monad or the "Spiritual Ego," during the last and supreme struggle. The "jar of feeling" then ought to be on my side, as indeed it only "seemed to be another illustration of the difference between eastern and western methods," but was not — not in this case at any rate. I can readily understand, my dear friend, that in the chilly condition you find yourself (mentally) in, you are prepared to bask even in the rays of a funeral pile upon which a living sutti is being performed; but why, why call it a — Sun, and excuse its spot — the corpse?
The letter addressed to me, which your delicacy would not permit you to read, was for your perusal and sent for that purpose. I wanted you to read it.
Your suggestion concerning G. K.'s next trial in art is clever, but not sufficiently as to conceal the white threads of the Jesuitically black insinuation. G. K. was however caught at it: "Nous verrons, nous verrons"! says the French song.
G. Khool says — presenting his most humble salaams — that you have "incorrectly described the course of events as regards the first portrait." What he says is this: (1) "the day she came" she did not ask you "to give her a piece of" etc. (page 300) but after you had begun speaking to her of my portrait, which she doubted much whether you could have. It is but after half-an-hour's talk over it in the front drawing room — you two forming the two upper points of the triangle, near your office door, and your lady the lower one (he was there he says) that she told you she would try. It was then that she asked you for "a piece of thick white paper" and that you gave her a piece of a thin letter paper, which had been touched by some very anti-magnetic person. However he did, he says, the best he could. On the day following, as Mrs. S. had looked at it just 27 minutes before he did it, he accomplished his task. It was not "an hour or two before" as you say for he had told the "O.L." to let her see it just before breakfast. After breakfast, she asked you for a piece of Bristol board, and you gave her two pieces, both marked and not one as you say. The first time she brought it out it was a failure, he says, "with the eyebrow like a leech," and it was finished only during the evening, while you were at the Club, at a dinner at which the old Upasika would not go. And it was he again, G.K. "great artist" who had to make away with the "leech," and to correct cap and features, and who made it "look like Master" (he will insist giving me that name though he is no longer my chela in reality), since M. after spoiling it would not go to the trouble of correcting it but preferred going to sleep instead. And finally, he tells me, my making fun of the portrait notwithstanding, the likeness is good but would have been better had M. sahib not interfered with it, and he, G.K. [been] allowed to have his own "artistic" ways. Such is his tale, and he therefore, is not satisfied with your description and so he said to Upasika who told you something quite different. Now to my notes.