Percival Lowell

“ A greater contrast could scarcely be offered than that between the pageant of an oldtime Japanese setting out upon a journey and a modern Japanese arrival from one by train; the polite eternity of self-deprecatory bows of the one, the scramble for the wicket of the other, where man, woman, and child bump and hustle their neighbors with an indifferent rudeness that, in any more personal land, would cause several free fights on the spot. That it does not do so here shows that though politeness has gone, personality has not yet come. ”

“ At the time we heard the epigram, which we subsequently so sadly mistook, we were conscious not only of hearing it, but of hearing it; afterwards this acoustic aura faded out, and therefore when the idea reappeared it bore no identifying tag, and we insensibly took it for one of our own. For though our own thoughts come to us as a rule quite differently fringed by a halo of their own, they sometimes have little or none, and the instinct of possession causes us to impute all such to ourselves—until increasing exactitude teaches us distrust. ”

“ The trance state would undo what evolution has done, and return to us a primeval savage in the body of an end-of-the-century man. But fortunately that most insipid individual, the normal man, whose mild portrait you shall see in any composite photograph, it is impossible to obtain. For the very essence of evolution consists in the survival of the slightly abnormal. The spirit of the cosmos is itself one great ideé fixe working itself out. The normality of the whole depends upon the abnormality of each part. To be a trifle onesided gives each of us our chance. ”

“ To how many men, I wonder, did it ever occur what an upsetting sensation it would be to change one's name at marriage. To be known by one name, to speak it, hear it, write it, read it, from the time one first remembered one's self, through all those years when habits are formed and crystallized, and then, presto! ”

“ So soon as one thinks about his thinking, he is, ipso facto, engaged upon a different thought, namely, the thought of thinking, a very different thing from simply thinking the thought; and the second idea inhibits the action of the first. The only way to become aware of what one seeks is, by a process akin to the optical trick of detecting a very faint star, to look a little off it with the mind's eye. One has to play detective on one's self; by sly show of inattention, to fool one's self, as one would fool another into being unsuspiciously natural. He will then detect instances by the gross. ”

“ Forty million of folk there are now innocent freaks of foreign suggestion. It is not simply the imitating of foreign customs, but the instant unassimilated character of the imitation that stamps the national state of mind as kin to hypnosis, and gives to both their cousinly touch of caricature. The new idea is adopted with little or no attempt at adaptation. Such sublime disregard of congruity shows the hypnotic completeness with which it is received. In consequence, Tōkyō is now one vast public platform, in which nature is giving an exhibition of ideal force. ”

“ Such self-abnegation fortunately, perhaps, is rare. For an assumption of probability induces us instantly to appropriate whatever has not upon it the stamp of another. Nor is there a more poignant chagrin than to awake suddenly to the knowledge, through some casually resurrected detail, that our yesterday's self-imputed epigram had been previously told us by Jones. Another's seal consists in those, often almost indescribable, concomitant details in which the foreign idea comes to us fringed, its setting in short. ”

“ I choose to attend to one thought rather than another, and then I do attend to it. But though will in action is thus all selective attention, all selective attention is not will. For on further scrutiny of my stream of thought I am made aware rather startlingly that will meddles with it uncommonly little. Observation shows me that the like is true of my fellows. Indeed, the greater part of all our lives is made up of will-less action, of simply thinking the act and then doing it without any exercise of will at all. Yet we are not conscious of being our own on-lookers merely. ”

“ The next peculiarity idiosyncratic of dreams consists in their seemingly rational irrationality. In our dreams the most unlikely people do the most impossible things, in the most easy, credible manner. A thread of apparent causation connects one act with the next; and the phantasmagoria rolls cheerfully on, breaking all the dramatic unities in its passage, in the most natural way in the world. In our deeper dream states the whole seems real; it is only in our less dense ones that wonder begins to mingle with the show, as a looker-on, who doubts without exactly disbelieving. ”

“ For the race characteristics are the ones most deeply graven into the character of the individual. They are the great arteries of thought, the well-worn channels through which the stream flows most easily. ”

“ She knows no hindering regard for self, no ghostly shapes of other thoughts to rise and cry to this one "Halt! enough!" So Japan. Decorous as was old Japan, young Japan, inoculated of foreign fancy, will cause even the rough and ready foreigner to start. Just as politeness stood personified—one may almost say petrified—in a Japanese gentleman of the old school, so rudeness incarnate jostles you in his son. ”

“ Nor, on the other hand, can consciousness be mere concomitant of brain processes, for if we have here simply a case of increased current, why is not the rest of the brain roused, and if we have not a case of it, why are the ideas that are roused more vivid? That the dream current might occasionally be stronger than a waking one is possible, but that our dreams should usually seem more vivid than our every-day waking experiences, which is certainly the case, is to credit nature with a strange lack of economy in the running of our psychic affairs. ”

“ Each is evidently conscious of itself, and conscious of the distinction between itself and all other selves, the man, in whose body it is, included. It has its own emotions which are not his; its own thoughts, which are not his; its own memories, which are not his. It not only denies that it is he; it really knows nothing of all those states of consciousness which alone are he. Except as an outsider, it neither knows him, nor he it.
It does not, of course, follow from the undeniable fact of its distinct psychical existence that it is either a god or a devil. ”

“ For under a better name this instinct is nothing but a subtler part of the instinct of self-preservation, the instinctive holding to all that makes for our individuality and the like antagonism to all that threatens it. Materially, this prejudice in favor of ourselves is now conceded to be misleading; yet it still survives immaterially, that is psychically, in our unnatural divorce between brain and mind. For not to have them two makes us one with all the rest of the universe. Whether we suppose mind to be matter or matter mind, we become in either case part and parcel of the material world ”

“ We feel that we must act in a certain way, often in a very trivial way, against our will, as we say, yet without questioning for an instant that it is we who act. As a matter of fact, it is the idea that for the moment is the I; and the faint remonstrance of which we are conscious is due to such faint side-ideas as are roused by its action.
But in the possession trance the dominant idea consists consciously in a change of identity. The consciousness in the entranced state throbs with the sense of this new personality as waking life does with the sense of self. ”

“ As it is, so little are we disturbed at the idea of it that we actually assist at our own apparent annihilation. We not only put ourselves to bed, but usually to sleep every night. We help nature close our eyes, and compose what is left of our minds to absolute inaction. To a certain extent we thus hypnotize ourselves nightly. Indeed, as our minds grow less active with years, some of us find no difficulty in performing this feat in the daytime.
All of which shows that the force which runs the brain machinery is regularly exhausted by action, and has to be as regularly recruited by rest. ”

“ That each god thus knows his own acts and sensations from those of every other god, in the same trance, and remembers his previous acts and sensations in successive trances, fulfills all the phenomena that we recognize as constituting an individual self. It is therefore only natural for it instantly and irrevocably to have been taken for such. On the other hand, that one god should have any idea of the actions of his predecessor when embodied, hints at a ground-work of unindividual self. ”

“ In ideal equipoise the whole mental energy, potential or actual, ceases approximately together, and starts again together. All of us, however, have probably been abnormal enough at times to have dreamed dreams. Now dreams are interesting things; interesting not only for what they show us, but far more interesting for what they intrinsically are. For they are twilights of thought, the dawn glimmerings of inner light before that be risen above the horizon of full sensibility. This half-way state of mind throws not a little light on clearer states of consciousness by comparison. ”

“ Less force is necessary to set them in motion. Not only is the subject's action under a suggested idea in keeping with his character, but it is impossible to get him to do things which are abhorrent to it. To induce a subject who is not essentially depraved to commit murder, for example, is practically beyond even the operator's power.
We have parallels to such semi-spontaneity of action of an habitual idea in every-day life. In a preoccupied state of mind we engage upon some act only to wake to find ourselves doing not the thing we started to do, but the habitual one. ”

“ If, however, while in the midst of it he be addressed by the operator, instantly certain striking phenomena follow. Out of a lethargy seemingly too deep for any stimulus to stir, he suddenly responds to the operator's word with the instantaneity of mechanism. He not only wakes to life again, but as soon appears to a most peculiar phase of it. For though he responds to the hypnotist as if he had been simply waiting to do so, his immediate response made, he sinks back once more into passivity. His action would seem merely the effect of momentum impressed from without ”

“ To carry conviction, a story must be above conviction itself. For the art of lying consists in consistency. The Autocrat's dictum, "Be not consistent, but be simply true," if reversed, would make a good motto for lying, "Be not true, but be simply consistent." Inasmuch, therefore, as facts conspire against the liar, it is the part of a long-headed man to think out his whole story in advance. But this these brachycephalic people never do. When caught and arraigned, a non-committal "Don't know" keeps their counsel, and lack of self-consciousness keeps their face. ”

“ The idea of self, religiously known as one's soul or spirit, presents itself to us under three aspects: as a feeling about ourselves; as a feeling about others as affecting ourselves; as a feeling about others independently of ourselves. The first we call the sense of self; the second, the personality of another; the last, simply a man's individuality. ”

“ It is hardly exaggeration to say that Japan at this moment is affording the rest of the world the spectacle of the most stupendous hypnotic act ever seen, nothing less than the hypnotization of a whole nation, with its eyes open. ”