[Skull]

It is small wonder indeed that the world is in the perilous state in which it now finds itself, if its shaky ethical sense is founded on no more stable and stronger foundation than that derived from a materialism which bases the loftiest and noblest intuitions of the human spirit upon appetites, impulses, and the beastly qualities which man shares with the most savage representatives of the animal kingdom!

The causes of such materialistic nightmares, for they are nothing but scientific nightmares, have arisen in a complete, and in certain cases it would almost seem in a willful, ignoring or turning aside from every noble quality and impersonal attribute which the human constitution contains. One might well ask the scientific gentlemen whether they have never known of other qualities, attributes, impulses, powers, and faculties in the human constitution, besides those beastly instincts which we share with the beast, and which, when unleashed, sink man to depths of depravity that even the beasts are incapable of reaching.

The argument becomes immediately preposterous, because it wilfully turns its face away from everything that the human constitution contains which makes man man, that has built the great civilizations of the past, that has brought about the efflorescence of all the activities of human genius, that has established the great works of moral splendor and intellectual light which have given hope and inspiration and inestimable comfort to the human race for ages past. On the basis itself that these materialistic evolutionists lay down, they fail to show any origins for such sublime qualities in the human soul as self-forgetful devotion, impersonal love, the strong ethical instinct of altruism, and the spiritual and intellectual fruits of its activity which the human spirit has produced in the world.

Purucker, The Esoteric Tradition, 1:291-2