Such, however, is neither the way of Nature nor of the Masters.
Sudden conversions have the same objections as attempts to win over the masses by phenomenalism.
The most open-minded of scientists, as of Theosophists, reason by habit rather than by pure ratiocination divorced from previous direction. Forcible changes of course therefore, being unsound as to their hold on the mind, however basically true, give rise to disastrous reactions, and sometimes, when too repellent temperamentally, to a complete rejection of reason and a recourse to simple blind prejudice and belief. The Le Puy man, discovered near La Denise, France, in 1844, is now admitted to be a genuine fossil of the Pliocene period. The former rejection of this fossil, because its high state of development did not conform to accepted theories, lends point to the curious case of the Cohuna skull recently found in Africa. Again and again we have noted the persistent tendency to set the age of bones, not by the geological evidence of antiquity, but by their relative primitiveness, the lineal upward development through the ages being assumed as the basic truth, and everything else being made to conform to that assumption.