Various

“ How are we to know the comparative cost of living without these details of expenditure? How else can we measure with any exactness the progress of civilization itself? How else can we discover the cohesive force of the family in holding together the structure of society, the mutual succor of young and old, the strong and the infirm or sick, the well-to-do and the victim of accident or ill-luck? ”

“ The poet who would achieve distinct success in the higher walks of poetry to-day must be master of an art surpassing that of all but a few of his brethren of the craft who have gone before him. The world of the known is so large, comparatively, now, and the individual is so far removed from the boundaries of the unknown, save, perhaps, at one point, that more art is required to induce him to travel the longer distance out of the world of cold fact into the borderland of strangeness where suggestions of new truth and new beauty may come to quicken aspirations. ”

“ But interesting and instructive though the operation of the locomotive may be, it is not for its own sake that I have mentioned it. It is rather in order to point out a remarkable parallel between its operation and that of a human body. A parallel, indeed, between the operation of a complex inanimate engine of iron and steel, and a still more complex living engine of flesh and bone and blood; both obeying the law of the conservation of energy, as well as the other laws of physics and chemistry.
Consider now a human body as a living engine. ”

“ It would be a most dangerous principle to admit that the treatment of disease and the right to ignore hygiene can become the perquisite of any religious faith. It would be equally unwarranted to permit the principles which are responsible for such beliefs to take shelter behind the ramparts of religious tolerance; for the essential principles of Christian Science do not constitute a form of Christianity any more than they constitute a science; but in so far as they do not altogether elude description, pertain to the domain over which medicine, physiology and psychology hold sway. ”

“ But the fullest life may weary at times and wish, for the mere rest of change, to go outside of itself and find in the strangeness of something new and not yet known a relaxation and recreation for the tired hand and brain. And so the strenuousness of modern life with its ceaseless outreaching for new pleasures and new truths will be ready always for the soothing restfulness of a poetry that gives the form of beauty to things just beyond the wonderland of the known. ”

“ That man is more than matter is, of course, conceded. But we here regard only the animal body, guided by the brain as its engineer. The day begins, as with the locomotive, by taking a store of fuel and water, namely, food and drink. Food is not, however, burned in the body in a confined receptacle, like coal in the fire box of an engine, but is digested, assimilated and distributed through the body by means of the circulating blood. And while some of it goes to repair bodily waste, becoming tissue, other portions are oxidized or burned to produce heat. ”

“ It is particularly the obligation of the torch-bearers of science to illuminate the path of progress and to transmit the light to their successors with undiminished power and brilliancy; this flame must burn both as a beacon-light to guide the wayfarer along the highways of advance and as a warning against the will-of-the-wisps that shine seductively in the bye-ways. ”

“ For to any one who can read and be convinced by the sequence of words of this system, ordinary logic has no power, and to him the world of reality brings no message. No form of the modern occult antagonizes the foundations of science so brusquely as this one. The possibility of science rests on the thorough and absolute distinction between the subjective and the objective. In what measure a man loses the power to draw this distinction clearly and as other men do, in that measure he becomes irrational and insane. ”

“ And to such poetry the world is ready to give a willing ear, though it will not be satisfied with the mere tricking out in rhyme and meter of scientific truth. The difficulty for the poet to-day is not merely that of new knowledge, but that of a science advancing so rapidly that the poet, whose art is meditative, can hardly avail himself of its latest revelations before their significance has vanished in the light of some new and revolutionary discovery announced from some investigator’s laboratory. ”

“ Doubtless new forms and phases of the occult will arise to take the place of the old as their popularity declines; and the world will be the more interesting and more characteristically a human dwelling-place for containing all sorts and conditions of minds. None the less it is the plain duty and privilege of each generation to utilize every opportunity to dispel error and superstition, and to oppose the dissemination of irrational beliefs. ”

“ Life, God, omnipotent Good, deny death, evil, sin, disease—Disease, sin, evil, death, deny Good, omnipotent God, Life.”
“What is termed disease does not exist.” “Matter has no being.” “All is mind.” “Matter is but the subjective state of what is here termed mortal mind.” “All disease is the result of education, and can carry its ill-effects no farther than mortal mind maps out the way.” ”

“ ACTING COMMISSIONER OF EDUCATION, PORTO RICO. The most beautiful and the most fruitful portions of the earth are at the present time in the possession of partially civilized, or barbarous and savage races, to the exclusion of the more enlightened Caucasian. Shall he ever remain unable to possess and occupy tropical lands to the exclusion of dark-skinned and inferior races? Will the time never come when he can rear a family of strong and vigorous children, of pure blood, under the equatorial sun? Is it true that the white man removing to the Tropics necessarily deteriorates? ”

“ His thought is mystic, and symbolism has an endless fascination for him. The mystic significance of numbers, extravagant analogies of correspondence, the traditional hidden meanings of the Kabbalah fairly intoxicate him; and verbose accounts of momentous relations and of unintelligible discoveries run riot in his writings. His science is not a mere Chemistry, but a Hyper-Chemistry; his transmutations are not merely material but spiritual. Like all followers of an esoteric belief, he must stand apart from his fellow-men ”

“ It is one thing to be open-minded and to realize the incompleteness of scientific knowledge and to appreciate how often what was ignored by one generation has become the science of the next; and it is a very different thing to be impressed with coincidences and dreams and premonitions, and to regard them as giving the keynote to the conceptions of nature and reality, and to look upon science as a misdirected effort. Such differences of attitude depend frequently upon a difference of temperament as well as upon intellectual discernment ”

“ Were civilized men ephemeral, observing the planets and satellites only for a few minutes, these bodies would be described as having proper motions of their own, as we find the stars to have. May it not then be that the stars also form a system; that each star is moving in a fixed orbit performing a revolution around some far-distant center in a period which may be hundreds of thousands or hundreds of millions of years? May it not be that there are systems of stars in which each star revolves around a center of its own while all these systems are in revolution around a single center? ”

“ The difference between truth and error, between science and superstition, between what is beneficent to mankind and what is pernicious, frequently lies in the interpretation and the spirit as much as or more than in the fact. The utilization of mental influences in health and disease becomes the one or the other according to the wisdom and the truth and the insight into the real relations of things that guide its application. ”

“ Economic science is likely to make the most satisfactory progress if we watch the social forces that surround us, detecting the operation of economic law in all its manifestations, and in observing, coördinating and recording the facts of economic life. It is not enough, to borrow the language of the biologist (part of which he himself borrowed from the old economist) , to talk of the struggle for existence, the survival of the fittest and of evolution. ”

“ And if he is a mental physician he must be a mental surgeon, too, and not plead that, “Until the advancing age admits the efficacy and supremacy of mind, it is better to leave the adjustment of broken bones and dislocations to the fingers of surgeons.” But it is unprofitable to consider the weakness of any occult system in its encounters with actual science and actual fact. It is simply as a real and prominent menace to rationality that these doctrines naturally attract consideration. ”

“ In the second place, food is the fuel of the body and is just as truly burned as is coal in a furnace. Moreover, the quantity of heat which a piece of meat or a slice of bread yields when burned in the body is just the same as if it had been burned in a stove. Complete combustion yields a definite amount of heat wherever and whatever may be the place and manner of burning. Any kind of food may serve as fuel for the body, but those which consist mainly of sugar, starch and fat, which contain no nitrogen and so cannot build up the body, are used chiefly as fuel. ”

“ He sees more and more the need for careful and industrious investigation, and prominent among the subjects which await his trained observation are the condition of the people and the related subject of the consumption of wealth. Training is, indeed, indispensable. Every social question has its purely economic elements for the skilled economist to unravel, and when this part of his task has been achieved, he is at an advantage in approaching the other parts of it, while his habit of mind helps him to know what to look out for and what to expect. ”