What did it mean to the American destiny and to the human channel through which that destiny was being formulated in the last century that the most illumined mind in the country, Ralph Waldo Emerson, twice talked to Abraham Lincoln in the White House at Washington during a dark year of the Civil War? What did it mean to Lincoln that the one man in America who could do so brought him a spiritual gift of hope, light, and fortitude? It is significant that a few months after Emerson's visit, Abraham Lincoln issued the preliminary proclamation of the Emancipation of the Slaves, an act which made the fighting of the war to the bitter end inevitable. To Emerson the war was an inescapable crusade. It was something holy in its resolve to remove the foulness of slavery from the land. Therefore he firmly opposed any end to the war which would not achieve this goal, or, in his own words, "Any peace restoring the old rottenness."
Philosophy aims at producing a group of men and women trained in mind control, accustomed to subordinate immediate interests to ultimate ends, sincerely desirous of serving humanity in fundamental ways, and possessed of philosophic knowledge which will make them valuable citizens. They will have balanced characters, based on refined feeling and exercised reason. It will be their constant endeavour to maintain a clear and definite outlook on the personal and public issues of the moment. Philosophy does not sit in helpless passivity when confronted with the spectacle of hustling cities and busy factories. Its supreme value to mankind lies in the solid ground it affords for a life devoted to the unremitting service of humanity.
In the magazine Lucifer, H.P. Blavatsky says, "If the voice of the mysteries has become silent for many ages in the West, if Eleusis, Memphis, Antium, Delphi have long ago been made the tombs of a science once as colossal in the West as it is yet in the East, there are successors now being prepared for them. We are in 1887 and the nineteenth century is close to its death. The twentieth century has strange developments in store for humanity."
The time has come to develop the knowledge and extend the understanding of a teaching which few know and fewer still understand. Occupied principally, as it is, with matters of eternal rather than ephemeral life, it finds today a larger opportunity for service than it could have found at any earlier period in consequence of the evolutionary forces which have been working on man's history, ideas, attitudes, communications, and productions. It is the most important knowledge which any human being could study.
-- Notebooks Category 20: What Is Philosophy? > Chapter 1 : Toward Defining Philosophy > # 397
