Book excerpt: What the masses call gods, are simply the First Principles of a Divine Essence permeating the creative and intelligent forces of Nature, and being diffused throughout the universe which is infinite. Theosophy is the spiritual as well as the physical science of that Truth, the very essence of deistic and philosophical research. We point to new intellectual horizons; we outline unexplored routes leading to the amelioration of humanity; and we offer a word of consolation to all the disinherited of the earth, whether suffering from starvation of soul or from lack of physical necessities. If one does not work for others one has no right to be called a Theosophist. The strife will be terrible between brutal materialism and blind fanaticism on the one hand, and philosophy and mysticism on the other — mysticism, that veil of more or less translucency, which hides Eternal Truth.