the phenomena: "Your views are wrong and dangerous." Perfect freedom of thought is the law and life of the Society; and if we are not fit for that, if we have not reached the position where we can understand that the more we can enrich the Society with differences of opinion and different standpoints, the more likely is it to do its work and live for centuries to come, when other new avenues of knowledge unfold before it, we are not ready to be members of the Theosophical Society at all. Now the Society has gone along those lines, along which every religion has gone, from the time of the Coulomb trial. What has been the effect of that on religions? A weakening power. We have to beware that the same thing does not take place with us that has taken place with the different religions of the past; we should take care--especially in an era wherein ordinary science on the physical plane is pressing onwards into the higher realms of the physical plane, and on to the very threshold of the astral plane, and bids fair to cross that threshold and demonstrate its teaching there--lest we, who claim to be in the forefront of this great movement, do not fall into the background, and become unworthy of carrying on the standard of knowledge. Therefore I would claim for the Society its place as a seeker after new knowledge, investigation by what we call clairvoyance, the definite and regular carrying out of the third object, which has been far too much neglected of late years; practically, where many years ago the Society was leading the way in the investigation of the hidden laws in Nature and the hidden powers in man, it now has to take a back seat with regard to the contributions it is making under that particular object for which amongst others it was founded. For more work has been done of late years by the Psychical Research and similar Societies than by the Theosophical Society, and that is neither right or wise--not right, because as long as we keep such research as one of our objects we ought to live up to it; not wise, because the lessons we have learnt, the various theories we have studied, are better guides to investigation than anything which the other Societies have, who have not yet been able to formulate theories but are simply in the state of collecting phenomena. For that reason it seems to me that the Society can do work here which the others cannot. They collect and verify with patient care masses of most interesting and valuable phenomena. The work done by the late Mr. Gurney and Mr. Myers, and a large number of their co-workers, is invaluable work from the standpoint of the Theosophical student. But there is no order in it; there is no reason in it. It is a mere chaos of facts, and they cannot explain or correlate them. They cannot classify or place them in order. They have no world-embracing knowledge which enables them to place each fact in its own place, and to show the relation of one set of facts to the other.