From the INTRODUCTION.
THE claims of Hermetic philosophy to the consideration of serious thinkers in the nineteenth century are not to be confounded with those merely of an exalted intellectual system, or of a sublime and legitimate aspiration. These may, indeed, be urged in behalf of it with the force of unadulterated truthfulness, but not as the principal point. What the philosophy which is indiscriminately called transcendental. Hermetic, Rosicrucian, mystical, and esoteric or occult, submits in its revived form, to the scrutator of life and her problems as a sufficing and rational cause for its resuscitation, and as an adequate ground for its recognition, is tersely this: - That it comprises an actual, positive, and realizable knowledge concerning the worlds which we denominate invisible, because they transcend the imperfect and rudimentary faculties of a partially developed humanity, and concerning the latent potentialities which constitute, by the fact of their latency, what is termed the interior man. In more strictly philosophical language, the Hermetic science is a method of transcending the phenomenal world, and attaining to the reality which is behind phenomena. At a time when many leaders of thought have substantially abandoned all belief in the existence of intelligence outside of the visible universe, it is almost superfluous to say that the mere claim of the mystics has an irresistible magnetic attraction for those who are conscious that deep down in the heart of every man there exists the hunger after the supernatural.
The mode of transcending the phenomenal world, as taught by the mystics, consists, and to some extent exclusively, of a form of intellectual ascension or develop- ment, which is equivalent to a conscious application of selective evolutionary laws by man himself to man.
Those latent faculties which are identified as Psychic Force pass, under this training, into objective life; they become the instruments of communication with the unseen world, and the modes of subsistence which are therein. In other words, the conscious evolution of the individual has germinated a new sense by which he is enabled to appreciate what is inappreciable by the grosser senses.
The powers of the interior man, and the possibility of communication with the unseen, are the subject of historical magic, which is filled with thaumaturgic accounts of experiments with these forces, and of the results of this communication. Whether these alleged occurrences are to be accepted as substantiated facts is not the question on which the enlightened mystic desires to insist. The evidence which supports them may be, and is, important; it may be, and is, overwhelming; but it is not upon the wonders of the Past only that the Hermetic claim is sought to be established, or demands recognition, in the Present. Whatever be the evidential value for the success of the psychic experiments conducted by the investigators of old, they may at least be said to constitute a sufficient ground for a new series of scientific inquiries on the part of those persons who are devoting their intelligence and their energy to the solution of the grand mysteries of existence. Otherwise, the transcendental philosophy would be simply the revival of an archaic faith, and would be wholly unadapted to the necessities of to-day. It should be remembered, however, when speaking of scientific inquiry, that the reference is not confined to the professed scientists of the period, but to all who are capable of exact observation, and can appreciate the momentous character of the issues involved....