“One can see no farther into a generalization than just so far as one’s previous acquaintance with particulars enables one to take it in.” (Agassis)
“Man’s extremity is God’s opportunity.” “Let one do all in one’s power and one’s nervous system will do the rest”.
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The hot place in a man’s Consciousness, the group of ideas to which he devotes himself and from which he works may be called the Habitual Centre of his personal Energy. It makes a great difference whether one set of his ideas or another be the centre of his energy. To say that a man is converted means that religious ideas, previously peripheral in his consciousness now take a central place and that religious aims form the habitual centre of his energy.
Up to what stage of spiritual development the Spiritual Excitement suffers a reaction?
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The degree of Spiritual Excitement can get at last so high and strong as to be sovereign.
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If we should conceive, for example, that the human mind with its different possibilities of equilibrium, might be like a many-sided solid with different surfaces on which it could lie flat, we might liken mental revolutions to the spatial revolutions of such a body. As it is pried up, say by a lever, from a position in which it lies on surface, A, for instance* it will linger for a time unstably half way up, and if the lever cease to wage it, it will tumble back or relapse under the continued pull of gravity. But if at last it rotate far enough for its centre of gravity to pass beyond surface A altogether, the body will fill over on surface B, say, and abide there permanently. The pulls of gravity towards A have vanished and may now be disregarded. The polyhedron has become immune against farther attraction from their direction.
Prof. Starbuck expresses the radical destruction of old influences physiologically as a cutting off of the connection between higher and lower cerebral centres. This condition is often reflected in experiences like the following:—
“Temptations from without still assail me, but there is nothing within to respond to them.”
The Ego here is wholly identified with the higher centres whose quality of feeling is that of withinness.
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Perfect conduct is a relation between three terms: the actor, the object for which he acts, and the recipients of the action. There must be harmony between the three: intention, execution, and reception.
One hears of the mechanical equivalent of heat. What. we now need to discover in the social realm is the moral equivalent of war: something heroic that will speak to men as universally as war does and yet will be as compatible with their spiritual selves as war has proved itself to be incompatible.
Carrying your life on the palm of your head, making yourself manure to the tree of nationality. Hardhearted, hard-headed, hard-fisted.
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An appeal to numbers has no logical force.
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Religion is indeed a thing of the heart. But that which enters the heart must first be discerned by the intelligence to be true. It must be seen as having in its own nature a right to dominate feeling.
Creeds are the grammar of religion. Speech never proceeded from Grammar but the reverse. As speech progresses and changes from unknown causes, grammar must follow.
Grammar, the grave of language.
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Ordinary Philosophy is like it hound hunting big own trail. The more he hunts, the farther he has to go. We travel on a journey that was accomplished before we set out. The real end is gained when we stay still.
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Pleasure comes of the realization of desire, but the desire is primarily for something else than the pleasure. The pleasure-seeker is an abstraction. To such a one all pleasure must cease.