A COMMON sense critic of scientific pretensions, who has wit, sanity and elevated moral intelligence all wrapped up in one person, is difficult to ignore.
Such a person is Mary Midgley, dubbed by the Guardian, UK as “the most frightening philosopher in the country” — and today nearly 11 years later, at age 91, she is still receiving accolades, and taking no prisoners.
We discovered this totem-toppling English moral philosopher by chance through a brief, unassuming comment she posted in the “Letters” section of the January 3-9, 2009, NewScientist — signed simply “Mary Midgley, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK.”
Her logic appeared seamless, and upon mulling her 257 insightful words over a week of lunch breaks, her ideas also felt convincingly Theosophical — indeed, strongly Blavatskian.
Midgley’s comments were aimed at Peter Millican’s on”Thinking Matter,” and her response goes to the essence of the issue:
“[T]he real trouble with the mind-body problem centres,” she writes, “on the word ‘materialism.’ This word is itself a relic of dualism.”
“It suggests that there are two rival stuffs — mind and matter — competing to be seen as basic to the world. It tells us to choose one of these and reduce the other to it.”
“Soul, the Self, or Ego, is studied by modem psychology as inductively as a piece of decayed matter by a physicist,” cries H. P. Blavatsky. “Psychology and its mother-plant metaphysics have fared worse than any other sciences.”
BETWEEN Science and Theology is a bewildered public, fast losing all belief in man’s personal immortality, in a deity of any kind, and rapidly descending to the level of materialism. 
BREAKING up is hard to do, even when false truths have betrayed us, they still cling like cotton candy, resurrecting like the mythical Hydra. For each head cut off, it grew two more.
WHEN our thick brains get all heated up worrying life’s complexities, that’s often the best time to kick off our shoes, and give it a rest.
MAINSTREAM scientists looking for the source of consciousness, insist its origin must be located in the physical brain.
EMBARRASSMENT can be, well, embarrassing—especially if you blush in public. We empathize, and also feel embarrassment for others.
MOST of us are so preoccupied with future expectations, we fail to see what’s right in front of us. 
WE are surrounded today by untold numbers and varieties of energy-intensive, man-made machines and gadgets.
VIEWED as the dependable Gaia, our Mother Earth is a beautiful and bountiful haven for life in the cosmos. 
ABSOLUTE certainty requires you to read a person’s mind directly. 
FOLLOWING H. P. Blavatsky’s death in 1891, an editorial was published in the New York Daily Tribune (founded by Horace Greeley) noting:
BETWEEN Science and Theology is a bewildered public, fast losing all belief in man’s personal immortality, in a deity of any kind, and rapidly descending to the level of materialism.
THE Cheyenne say that “our first teacher is our own heart,” but mainstream science offers few apples to our inner instructor.
MOST of us are so preoccupied with future expectations, we fail to see what’s right in front of us.
WE are surrounded today by untold numbers and varieties of energy-intensive, man-made machines and gadgets.
