"We see that every external motion, act, gesture, whether voluntary or mechanical, organic or mental, is produced and preceded by internal feeling or emotion, will or volition, and thought or mind"
About this Quote
The sentence asserts the primacy of inner life over outer expression. Motion, behavior, even the most automatic or seemingly mechanical responses, are framed as downstream effects of feeling, willing, and thinking. By pairing terms like feeling/emotion, will/volition, and thought/mind, it sketches a layered inner economy that generates conduct: affect stirs, intention congeals, cognition orients, and the body obeys. The sweep of the claim is deliberate. It refuses to carve out exceptions for reflexes or organic processes, implying that what looks automatic is still nested in, or conditioned by, subtler currents of consciousness.
That stance fits Helena Petrovna Blavatsky’s larger Theosophical project in the late 19th century. Against rising materialism and the new prestige of mechanistic explanations, she argued that consciousness is fundamental and that phenomena unfold from inner to outer, not the reverse. The Theosophical cosmology pictured multiple planes of being in which causes originate in subtler mental and emotional fields before crystallizing as physical events. The line therefore functions both metaphysically and ethically. If action is the precipitate of inner life, then transformation must begin within. Karma is not only a cosmic bookkeeping but a psychological law: thought becomes habit, habit becomes fate.
There is also a critique of reductionism here. To describe behavior purely in terms of stimulus and response leaves out the initiating role of value, meaning, and intention. Even when modern physiology locates a reflex in neural circuitry, the human context in which that circuitry operates has been shaped by long histories of emotion and belief. The claim does not deny the body; it integrates it into a continuum where mind is causal and matter expressive.
Practically, the sentence reads as a call to inner governance. Cultivating clarity of thought, steadiness of will, and compassion in feeling is not ornamental spirituality; it is the only reliable way to alter conduct and, by extension, the texture of shared life.
That stance fits Helena Petrovna Blavatsky’s larger Theosophical project in the late 19th century. Against rising materialism and the new prestige of mechanistic explanations, she argued that consciousness is fundamental and that phenomena unfold from inner to outer, not the reverse. The Theosophical cosmology pictured multiple planes of being in which causes originate in subtler mental and emotional fields before crystallizing as physical events. The line therefore functions both metaphysically and ethically. If action is the precipitate of inner life, then transformation must begin within. Karma is not only a cosmic bookkeeping but a psychological law: thought becomes habit, habit becomes fate.
There is also a critique of reductionism here. To describe behavior purely in terms of stimulus and response leaves out the initiating role of value, meaning, and intention. Even when modern physiology locates a reflex in neural circuitry, the human context in which that circuitry operates has been shaped by long histories of emotion and belief. The claim does not deny the body; it integrates it into a continuum where mind is causal and matter expressive.
Practically, the sentence reads as a call to inner governance. Cultivating clarity of thought, steadiness of will, and compassion in feeling is not ornamental spirituality; it is the only reliable way to alter conduct and, by extension, the texture of shared life.
Quote Details
| Topic | Free Will & Fate |
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