Perhaps it is time, not to check the investigations of science, but to control its discoveries and to reserve, as the occultists wisely did, for a select circle of Initiates, rigorously tested and bound by inviolable oaths, the secret of those too perilous energies around which we are feeling our way and which are on the point of revealing themselves and becoming public property. Our moral evolution is several centuries behind our scientific evolution; and it is more than probable that the latter, being too swift and too intensive, may disastrously impede the former. It will profit no one to travel in three hours from Paris to Pekin, from Pekin to New York and from New York to Calcutta, if these repeated and miraculous journeys leave those who take them in the same frame of mind on their arrival as on their departure. We are more or less in the same position as Russia, whose heart and spirit were not steadfast enough, not resolute enough, to bear what the head had too quickly and too artificially stored up. Nothing is more quickly disseminated or more readily assimilated than the results of science; nothing, on the other hand, is more slow, more painful or more precarious than moral evolution; and yet it is upon this alone, as we are realizing more and more clearly, that man’s happiness and future depend. KARMA XVIII KARMA 1 Stripped of its innumerable and inextricable oriental complications, which may possibly correspond with realities but which cannot be verified, Karma, the infallible Law of Retribution, is, when all is said, what we, speaking more vaguely and without believing in it unduly, call Immanent Justice. Our Immanent Justice is a somewhat idle shadow. True, it often manifests itself after monstrous actions, great vices, sins or iniquities; but we rarely have the opportunity of seeing it intervene in the thousand petty acts of injustice, cruelty, weakness, dishonesty and baseness of ordinary life, though the aggregate of these paltry but incessant misdeeds may weigh heavier than the most notorious crime. In any case, its action being more dispersed, more diffuse, slower and more often moral than material, nearly always escapes our observation; and, as, on the other hand, it appears to cease at the moment of death, it hardly ever has time to demand its due and usually arrives too late at the bedside of a sick or dying man, who has lost consciousness or no longer has the time to expiate his offences.