Conjuration

“ What one misfortune or disaster in the book of embryotic evils, that could unmechanize thy frame, or entangle thy filaments! which has not fallen upon thy head, or ever thou camest into the world—what evils in thy passage into it!—What evils since!—produced into being, in the decline of thy father's days—when the powers of his imagination and of his body were waxing feeble—when radical heat and radical moisture, the elements which should have temper'd thine, were drying up ”

“ The other side of “the divide,” evolution had been physical,—body, and body function had been the goal. This side “the divide,” it was spiritual and social, and the goal was the evolution of the man within man. The things which mattered now were love, sacrifice, service, goodwill rather than “tooth and claw.” Before, nature’s goal had been along the line of least resistance. Now, the line of march set straight against instinct and along the line of greatest resistance. There could be advance on [30] this side “the divide,” only as the ideal became clearer and its sway more coercive. ”

“ You think it will be doing any good to your cause to go into that matter with me now?"
"I cannot say; but I must first clear my conscience and then try to convince you that quarrel or no quarrel, he never took his own life. He was not that kind. ”

“ To my apprehension, a volition is not an efficient, but simply a physical cause. Our will causes our bodily actions in the same sense, and in no other, in which cold causes ice, or a spark causes an explosion of gunpowder. The volition, a state of our mind, is the antecedent; the motion of our limbs in conformity to the volition, is the consequent. This sequence I conceive to be not a subject of direct consciousness, in the sense intended by the theory. The antecedent, indeed, and the consequent, are subjects of consciousness. But the connection between them is a subject of experience. ”

“ The first moment in astronomical science arrives when the savage, looking at a star, says, like the child in the nursery poem, 'How I wonder what you are!' The next moment comes when the savage has made his first rough practical observations of the movements of the heavenly body. ”

“ What Rapture Is. The Blessing It Is to the Soul. The Effects of It.
1. I wish I could explain, with the help of God, wherein union differs from rapture, or from transport, or from flight of the spirit, as they speak, or from a trance, which are all one. [1] I mean, that all these are only different names for that one and the same thing, which is also called ecstasy. [2] It is more excellent than union, the fruits of it are much greater, and its other operations more manifold; for union is uniform in the beginning, the middle, and the end, and is so also interiorly. ”

“ When into a chaos of detached observations is introduced an observation akin to them in which a causal relation is discernible, it forthwith commences assimilating to itself from this heap of observations those which are congruous, and tends even to coerce into union those of which the congruity is not manifest. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Yet the very fulness of this flow and the closeness of this weaving, their great and ever-increasing orderliness and spontaneity, such as we can and must conceive them to have been present during the majority of the moments of her convert and waking life, tended, during such times, to obliterate any clear consciousness of their different constituents, and to produce the impression of one single state, even one single act. ”

“ If you but recognized how little stands between you and your awareness of your union! Be not deceived by the illusions it presents of size and thickness, weight, solidity and firmness of foundation. Yes, to the body's eyes it looks like an enormous solid body, immovable as is a mountain. Yet within you is a Force that no illusions can resist. ”

“ They were to carry with them a double force—a force of coercion, visible and palpable; a force addressed to conscience, neither visible nor palpable, and in its nature only capable of being inwardly appreciated. ”

“ For such are but some out of the many forms in which man has struggled to give expression to his intuitions that there is something wrong in nature—to his deep sense of division and conflict in the cosmic process. Heracleitus, as we saw, held that conflict is an essential condition of existence. ”

“ REPERCUSSION The principle of sympathetic vibration mentioned above also provides the explanation of the strange and little-known phenomenon called repercussion, by means of which any injury done to, or any mark made upon, the materialized body in the course of its wanderings will be reproduced in the physical body. ”

“ Yet these movements are in many ways in conflict with one another, and they naturally tend to bring one another to a uniformity—that is, into a state in which one movement is as little obstructive to the other as possible. ”

“ And that we may the better finde what the cause of Congruity and Incongruity in bodies is, it will be requisite to consider, First, what is the cause of fluidness; And this, I conceive, to be nothing else but a certain pulse or shake of heat; for Heat being nothing else but a very brisk and vehement agitation of the parts of a body (as I have elswhere made probable) the parts of a body are thereby made so loose from one another, that they easily move any way, and become fluid. ”

“ We shall find that all the facts of rivalry and substitution that have so struck us, all the shiftings and expansions and contractions of the sphere of what shall be considered me and mine, are but results of the fact that certain things appeal to primitive and instinctive impulses of our nature, and that we follow their destinies with an excitement that owes nothing to a reflective source. These objects our consciousness treats as the primordial constituents of its Me. ”

“ But, to turn now to our second type of the collision, inasmuch as the external powers of Nature are not that which is most essential to the interests and contradictions of human life, in cases where they are found closely associated with such spiritual relations, they will present themselves merely as the ground from which the collision breaks forth in its true character. This is the point of view from which we must regard all situations, where we trace the original source of conflict in the facts of natural birth. ”

“ And just as all particular things are evolved by the force of attraction and dissolved by the force of repulsion, a state of concentration or aggregation in the individual perpetually alternating with a state of diffusion or segregation, so it is also with the material universe as a whole. ”

“ Law of Attraction.—Where this affinity—or sameness—exists between the different things, there is what we term the law of attraction, or what may be termed the disposition to unite together. Where there is no affinity existing between the nature of the different particles of matter, there is what may be termed the law of repulsion, which has a tendency to destroy the harmony which would otherwise take place. ”

“ It is sufficient to know, in this case, that the earth will be smitten with a curse unless there is a welding link of some kind or other between the fathers and the children, upon some subject or other—and behold what is that subject? ”

“ By this mutual transfusion an equilibrium is preserved, like that which similar processes maintain in the natural world, and while a healthy, popular feeling circulates through the Aristocracy, a sense of their own station in the scale elevates the People. ”

“ Let us suppose that an eminent physicist watches a sleight-of-hand conjuror, who produces a dozen or more eggs from a small velvet bag, which was unquestionably empty when examined by the audience a few seconds previously; he will certainly not assume mediumistic powers on the part of the conjuror, or postulate the materialisation of a spirit hen. ”

“ That Confusion is the baby's universe; and the universe of all of us is still to a great extent such a Confusion, potentially resolvable, and demanding to be resolved, but not yet actually resolved, into parts. ”

“ But see what you have to avoid, what to observe, and what to fear. It happens that, in the human body, or in any other body, some member may be cut off, hand, finger, or foot. Does the soul follow it when cut off? ”

“ Let the tenth motion be that of avoidance, or that which is opposed to the motion of lesser congregation, by which bodies, with a kind of antipathy, avoid and disperse, and separate themselves from, or refuse to unite themselves with others of a hostile nature. ”

“ Several other things might be advanced to show, that this definition agrees best with the common popular notion of the word force. If two bodies meet directly with a shock, which mutually destroys their motion without producing any other sensible effect, the vulgar would pronounce, without hesitation, that they met with equal force ”

“ The notion that we can transfer our guilt and sufferings to some other being who will bear them for us is familiar to the savage mind. It arises from a very obvious confusion between the physical and the mental, between the material and the immaterial. ”

“ Also, the energy and force of expansion which they have in common do not enable us to understand how, in spite of the conflict which divides them, they may be transformed into one another or substituted for each other in their respective functions, and how the pure may contaminate while the impure sometimes serves to sanctify. ”

“ And they will all scourge and slay one another to force their belief in their fragment upon the others—till, grown wiser through travelling in each others' regions, they come to the harmonious agreement that the sun sends out light of varying colours. ”

“ The several motions of the mind may produce either but one, or several sorts of motions in some part or parts of the body; and as the sensitive motions of anger will produce tears, so will the motions of joy; but grief made by the rational motions of the mind, may by excess disturb and make a general alteration of the sensitive motions in an animal: the same may excessive joy. ”

“ The great Tragedy of Nature, which is called the Struggle for Existence, results simply from a greater or less incongruousness between any form of life and its surroundings....The comic is found in an incongruous relation considered merely as to its FORM, while the tragic is found in an incongruous relation taken as to its reality." For this word incongruity I would substitute collision or conflict. ”

“ That the Nature of extension or dilation strives or endeavours to get space, ground, or compass, I mean those corporeal motions endeavour to make place and space by their extensions, that is, to spread their parts of matter into a larger compass or body. And when I say, That Contractions endeavour to cast or thrust out space, place, ground, or compass, My meaning is, That those corporeal motions endeavour to draw their parts of matter into a more close and solid body, for there is no place nor space without body. ”

“ As world is balanced against world in the [Pg 408] universe, so in the human fabric, in the vegetable structure, in the crystallized gem, or in the rude rock, force is weighed against force, and the balance hangs in tranquillity. ”

“ The 'physical phenomena' which answer among savages to the use of the 'divining rod,' and to 'spiritist' marvels in modern times, have only been glanced at. In short, all the savage parallels to the so-called 'psychical phenomena' now under discussion in England, America, Germany, Italy, and France, have escaped critical analysis and comparison with their civilised counterparts. ”

“ When, going a step further back, we seek a warrant 310for the assumption that of the two conflicting forces, that is the greater which produces motion in its own direction, we find no other than the consciousness that such part of the greater force as is unneutralized by the lesser, must produce its effect—the consciousness that this residuary force cannot disappear, but must manifest itself in some equivalent change—the consciousness that force is persistent. ”

“ Now, to give you an instance how the disproportion of some bodies in one respect, may be counter-ballanc’d by a contrary disproportion of the same body in another respect, whence we find that the subtil vinous spirit is congruous, or does readily mix with water, which in many properties is of a very differing nature, we may consider that a unison may be made either by two strings of the same bigness, length, and tension, or by two strings of the same bigness, but of differing length, and a contrary differing tension, or 3ly. ”

“ Thus in anger we have over and above pain a more or less definite object as its cause, and a certain characteristic reactive display—frowns, compressed lips, erect head, clenched fists, in a word, the combative attitude—as its effect, and similarly of other emotions; so that generally in the particular movements indicative of particular emotions the primary and primitive effects of feeling are overlaid by what Darwin has called serviceable associated habits. ”

“ If we bear in mind that emotion means discharge of force, an adequate explanation of such phenomena in a great many instances, at least, is to be found in the principle of conflict and dissociation. The conflict is between the impulsive forces of the emotions pertaining either to antagonistic instincts or to sentiments organized within different systems. With the excitation of emotion, instincts and sentiments which have opposing conative tendencies are inhibited, repressed, or dissociated, 501and with them the systems with which they are organized. ”

“ When we exclaim, "What force!" on seeing a head with prominent bushy brows, incisive nose, deep-set eyes, and a massive jaw, we are indeed expressing our recognition of force, but only of the sort of force underlying instincts of aggression and brutality. ”