Science & Tech Quote by H. P. Blavatsky

Blavatsky frames disbelief as a failure of imagination disguised as rigor. By calling materialism the "chief difficulty", she doesn’t argue that science has disproven spirits; she suggests science has pre-committed itself to a narrow ontology, then congratulated itself for finding only what it agreed to count as real. The phrasing is strategic: "men of science" invokes institutional authority, while "difficulty" softens the accusation. It’s not that scientists are wrong, she implies, they’re blocked - psychologically, culturally, almost spiritually.

The subtext is a bid for epistemic parity. "Divine as well as ... nature Spirits" collapses a hierarchy: gods and elementals sit on the same continuum, both treated as legitimate objects of inquiry if the investigator would stop insisting that matter is the only admissible evidence. That "as well as" is doing ideological work, smuggling esoteric metaphysics into the grammar of reasonable pluralism.

Context matters: late-19th-century Europe was intoxicated with positivism, new technologies, Darwin, and the prestige of laboratory method. Blavatsky, a key architect of Theosophy, wasn’t trying to retreat from modernity so much as compete with it - offering a counter-modern expertise where séances, Eastern religious ideas, and occult cosmologies could claim the same explanatory glamour as geology or physiology. Her provocation also flatters the audience she wants: those who feel that official science is spiritually tone-deaf, and that skepticism is less a triumph of intellect than a habit of exclusion.