This accounts for the necessity under which the writer has laboured of ever explaining the facts given from the hoariest past by evidence gathered from the historical period, even at the risk of being once more charged with a lack of method and system. No other means was at hand. The public must be made acquainted with the efforts of many world‐adepts, of initiated poets and writers in the classics of every age, to preserve in the records of humanity the knowledge at least of the existence of such a philosophy, if not actually of its tenets. The Initiates of 1888 would indeed remain incomprehensible and even a seemingly impossible myth, were not like Initiates shown to have lived in every other age of history. This could be done only by naming chapter and verse where mention may be found of these great characters, who were preceded and followed by a long and interminable line of other famous antediluvian and postdiluvian Masters in the arts. Thus only could it be shown, on semi‐traditional and semi‐ historical authority, that occult knowledge and the powers it confers on man, are not altogether fictions, but that they are as old as the world itself. To my judges, past and future, therefore—whether they are serious literary critics, or those howling dervishes in literature who judge a book according to the popularity or unpopularity of the author’s name, who, hardly glancing at its contents, fasten like lethal _bacilli_ on the weakest points of the body—I have nothing to say. Nor shall I condescend to notice those crack‐brained slanderers—fortunately very few in number—who, hoping to attract public attention by throwing discredit on every writer whose name is better known than their own, foam and bark at their very shadows. These, having first maintained for years that the doctrines taught in the _Theosophist_, and which culminated in _Esoteric Buddhism_, had been all _invented_ by the present writer, have finally turned round, and denounced _Isis Unveiled_ and the rest as a plagiarism from Éliphas Lévi (!), Paracelsus (!!), and, _mirabile dictu_, Buddhism and Brâhminism (!!!). As well charge Renan with having stolen his _Vie de Jésus_ from the Gospels, and Max Müller his _Sacred Books of the East_ or his _Chips_ from the philosophies of the Brâhmans and of Gautama, the Buddha. But to the public in general and the readers of THE SECRET DOCTRINE I may repeat what I have stated all along, and which I now clothe in the words of Montaigne: _Gentlemen, __“__I have here made only a nosegay of culled flowers, and have brought nothing of my own but the string that ties them.__”_ Pull the “string” to pieces and cut it up in shreds, if you will. As for the nosegay of _facts_—you will never be able to make away with these. You can only ignore them, and no more.