Daily Inspiration Quote by H. P. Blavatsky

Blavatsky is trying to flip the usual hierarchy of explanation: the body is not the primary fact of human life but its afterimage. Every twitch, decision, ritual, and reflex becomes, in her framing, a downstream effect of an inner weather system - feeling, will, thought. It’s a maximal claim, and that’s the point. The sentence doesn’t argue cautiously; it declares jurisdiction. By stacking pairs like “voluntary or mechanical, organic or mental,” she attempts to annex the whole human machine, from the knee-jerk to the moral choice, into a single interior cause.

The subtext is polemical. In the late 19th century, physiology and emerging psychology were busy mapping behavior onto nerves, brains, and stimulus-response mechanics. Blavatsky, as the Theosophy founder, rejects a strictly materialist story without sounding like she’s merely preaching soul-talk. Notice the strategic breadth of her categories: “emotion, will, thought” reads less like a clinical model than a spiritual anatomy, a way of smuggling metaphysics into the language of causation.

Rhetorically, the sentence works by making “internal” feel inevitable: “produced and preceded” doubles the causality, insisting not just on correlation but on primacy. It also collapses distinctions modern readers might guard - reflex vs intention, body vs mind - because her project depends on continuity. If all action is first inner action, then self-mastery becomes the master technology: change consciousness, and the world (including the body) follows. That’s not just philosophy; it’s a recruitment pitch for an entire cosmology.