PART II.
The Place of Phenomena in the Theosophical Society Spiritual and Temporal Authority The Relation of Masters to the Theosophical Society The Future of the Theosophical Society _Four Lectures delivered to the Blavatsky Lodge, London, on 13th and 27th June, 4th and 11th July 1907._ The Place of Phenomena in the Theosophical Society I have taken for these four lectures, confined to members of the Theosophical Society, four subjects of great interest to ourselves, and in dealing with them I propose to ask you to look at them from a wide standpoint rather than a narrow one, and to consider the Theosophical Movement and the Theosophical Society, not as an isolated movement or Society, not as a separate thing, but rather as one of a series of spiritual impulses, like to its predecessors in its nature, interested in the same questions, and subject to the same conditions as those that preceded it in time.
We find, looking back over the history of the past, that great spiritual impulses occur from time to time, and each of these in the past has founded a new religion, or stamped some marked change in a religion already existing.

The spiritual impulse that brought to birth the Theosophical Society is to be thought of as of the same nature as those which founded one religion in the world after another.

And if we regard it in this way we can sometimes, looking at the whole succession of such movements, recognise certain definite principles working in all of them, and then apply those principles to the movement of our own time.

And this seems to me to be a wiser and saner way of regarding the Theosophical Society than looking upon it as unique and isolated.

Certainly it is more easy to see our way in the solution of difficult problems of our own time, if we regard these problems as similar in nature to the problems that have been presented to our predecessors.