32 NEO-SPIRITUALISM
In the previous chapter there was occasion to refer to people who would like to react against the existing disorder, but have not the knowledge necessary to enable them to do so effectively, and so are 'neutralized' in one way or another and directed into blind alleys; but in addition to these people there are also others who are only too easily driven yet further along the road leading to subversion. The pretext put before the latter, as things are at present, is most often that of 'fighting materialism', and no doubt most of them believe sincerely that they are doing so; but people in the firstnamed category who want to live up to this belief merely end up in the dreariness of a vague 'spiritualist' philosophy that is without any real significance but is at least relatively harmless, whereas those in the second category are moving toward the domain of the worst psychic delusions, and that is far more dangerous. The former are indeed all more or less affected unknowingly by the modern spirit, but not deeply enough to be entirely blinded by it, but it is the latter whom we must now consider, and they are wholly penetrated by it, and moreover they usually glory in their 'modernity'; the only thing that horrifies them among all the various manifestations of the modern spirit is materialism, and they are so fascinated by this one idea that they do not see that many other things, such as the science and the industry they admire, are closely dependent, both in their origin and in their intrinsic nature, on the very materialism that so distresses them. This makes it easy to see why the sort of attitude they display must now be encouraged and spread: such people are the best unconscious auxiliaries it would be possible to find for the second phase of anti-traditional action. Materialism has nearly played its part, and these are the people to spread its successor about
the world: they will even be used to assist actively in opening the 'fissures' spoken of earlier, for in this domain it is not merely 'ideas' or theories of one sort or another that count, but also and simultaneously a 'practice' that will bring them into direct relations with subtle forces of the lowest order; and they lend themselves all the more readily to this work owing to their total ignorance of the true nature of such forces, to which they go so far as to attribute a 'spiritual' character.
This is what has in a general way been described as 'neo-spiritualism', to distinguish it from mere philosophical 'spiritualism'; it might be sufficient only to mention it here for the purpose of 'putting it on record', since two earlier studies have been specially devoted to its most widespread forms, [1], but it is too important an element among those that are specially characteristic of the contemporary period to justify the omission of some mention at least of its main features, keeping back for the moment the 'pseudo-initiatic' aspect of the work of most of the schools attached to it (with the exception of the spiritualist schools that are openly profane and must be so owing to the exigencies of their extreme 'popularization'), for that is a matter that will have to be returned to later. First of all it should be noted that there is no question of a homogenous whole, but of something that assumes a multitude of different forms, though they always show enough common characteristics to admit of being legitimately grouped together under one designation; it is therefore all the more strange that all such groups, schools, and 'movements' are constantly in a state of rivalry or even of conflict one with another, to such an extent that it would be difficult to find elsewhere, except perhaps between political 'parties', hatreds more violent than those that exist between their adherents, while all the time, by a curious irony, they all have a mania for preaching 'fraternity' in season and out of season! Here is a truly 'chaotic' phenomenon, which may give the impression even to superficial observers of disorder carried to an extreme: it is indeed an indication that 'neo-spiritualism' already represents a fairly advanced stage on the road to dissolution.
On the other hand, in spite of the aversion it evinces toward materialism, 'neo-spiritualism' resembles it in more than one way, so much so that it has been referred to not unjustly as 'transposed materialism', meaning materialism extended beyond the limits of the corporeal world, this being clearly exemplified by the crude representations of the subtle world, wrongly called 'spiritual', already alluded to and consisting almost entirely of images borrowed from the corporeal domain. This same 'neo-spiritualism' is also attached to the earlier stages of the modern deviation, in a more effective way, through what may be called its 'scientistic' side; that too has been previously alluded to when dealing with the influence exerted on the various schools from the moment of their birth by scientific 'mythology'; and it is worthwhile to note more especially the important part played in these conceptions, in quite a general way and without any exception, by 'progressivist' and 'evolutionary' ideas, which are indeed among the most typical features of the modern mentality, and would suffice by themselves to characterize any conceptions as being beyond all doubt the products of that mentality. Moreover, even the schools that affect an appearance of 'archaism' by making use in their own way of fragments of uncomprehended and deformed traditional ideas, or by disguising modern ideas as they think fit under a vocabulary borrowed from some traditional form either Eastern or Western (all of which things, by the way, are in formal contradiction to their belief in 'progress' and 'evolution'), are constantly preoccupied in adapting these ancient ideas