Entelechy

“ The recollection came like a track of fire across his brain. Memory! how glorious, how terrible art thou! With the wand of the enchanter thou canst change every current of feeling into joy or woe. The same agency—nay, the same object—shall awaken the most opposite emotions. The simplest forms and the subtlest agents are alike to thee. Nature seems fashioned at thy will, and her attributes are but the instruments of thy power. ”

“ They impress the soul with a certain mark, and sail forthwith out of vision. Your hold upon your own mind is at this time very insecure, and you flutter with the flames in and out of sanity. For to feel and to be unable to refer your feeling to its components is to verge on madness. ”

“ He stood and gazed, then, with his arms folded on his chest, while the people walking to and fro passed and repassed him, and many a one commented as they went, and assigned him a history and a character from their own imagination. How seldom is it, in the busy world with which we mingle, that any of the conjectures regarding our thoughts, our feelings, our state of existence, are correct! ”

“ The mind dances from scene to scene, unites all pleasures in all combinations, and riots in delights which Nature and fortune, with all their bounty, cannot bestow.
“In time some particular train of ideas fixes the attention; all other intellectual gratifications are rejected; the mind, in weariness or leisure, recurs constantly to the favourite conception, and feasts on the luscious falsehood whenever she is offended with the bitterness of truth. ”

“ These observations lead us to consider the character of the fanatical visionary, who feels, like the happy enthusiast, the same agitation of passion, and the same inflammation of mind; but as the feelings of one are founded upon knowledge, truth, and nature, so the feelings of the other are the result of ignorance and error, and all the glittering meteors of his brain the effects of imposture and deception. ”

“ In certain cases, especially among men of unusual intelligence and high attainments, the exaltation of incipient madness takes rather the guise of a scientific or philosophic enthusiasm. Instead of imagining himself the possessor of untold wealth, or the absolute despot of a servile people, the patient deludes himself with the belief that he has made a great discovery or lighted upon a splendid generalization of the deepest and most universal importance. ”

“ For as there is in man a double cognitive power, to wit the intellect and imagination, so there is a double appetite, the Will proceeding from the Intellect, which is the Page or servant of the rational soul, and the sensitive Appetite, which cohering to the imagination, is said to be the hands, or procuratrix of the corporeal soul. ”

“ Dishonesty, envy, and mad ambition are “lusts of the flesh,” which uproot the germs of growth in Science and leave the inscrutable problem of being unsolved. Through the channels of material sense, of worldly policy, pomp, and pride, cometh no success in Truth. ”

“ In the one the incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural, and the excellence aimed at was to consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing them real. And real in this sense they have been to every human being who, from whatever source of delusion, has at any time believed himself to be under supernatural agency. ”

“ I have still some vague recollection of an endeavour I made to trace the character of the insanity in every case to some early trait of the individual in childhood, when, overcome by passion or overbalanced by excitement, the faculties run wild into all those excesses which in after years develop eccentricities of character, and in some weaker temperaments aberrations of intellect. ”

“ To some temperaments it might seem as though this reduction of the immense unfathomable universe to a congeries of living souls were a strangling limitation. There are certain human temperaments, and my own is one of them, whose aesthetic sense demands the existence of vast interminable spaces of air, of water, of earth, of fire, or even of blank emptiness. ”

“ To the instinct for gauging men he added the instinct of gauging popular sentiment—a perception of the line which must not be over-stepped; a knack of gracious and timely withdrawal if ever he seemed to have passed the danger-point. ”

“ I heard of one man, clever but eccentric, who became so exasperated at seeing the volumes in every body's hand, and hearing them in every body's mouth, that he conceived a sort of personal enmity to them, impiously dissenting from their conclusions and questioning their premises. ”

“ Discreet and reticent as we have all been, and careful in our criticisms of so bizarre an event, there still must be many to question the reality of such superstitious fears, and some to ask if such a sound could be without human agency, and a very guilty agency, too. ”

“ You demonstrate yourself, so as to put yourself out of the reach of false relations, and you draw to you the first-born of the world, — those rare pilgrims whereof only one or two wander in nature at once, and before whom the vulgar great show as spectres and shadows merely. ”

“ Unawares we have wandered from the delusional greatness to true greatness. But who will presume to decide what is true greatness and what delusion? How many discoverers and inventors were ridiculed and their imposing greatness stigmatized as delusion, and how many intellectual ciphers rejoiced in the applause and the worship of their contemporaries! ”

“ And so it was that I, the modern, often entered into my dreaming, and in the consequent strange dual personality was both actor and spectator. And right often have I, the modern, been perturbed and vexed by the foolishness, illogic, obtuseness, and general all-round stupendous stupidity of myself, the primitive. ”

“ Errors generated in this manner possess, commonly, some aspect of beauty or of greatness, or of philosophical simplicity, to recommend them; for as they were framed amid a pleasurable excitement of the mind, so they will have power to convey a kindred delight to others. And such exorbitances of doctrine, when advanced by men of powerful or richly furnished minds, conceal their deformity and evil tendency beneath the attractions of intelligence. ”

“ Elasticity of thought, unprejudiced by suspicion, soon imparted its health-giving impression to the movements of the body, and action of the senses, directing them to the cultivation of useful occupations devoted to the common welfare. This freedom, in surcease from the treacherous enactments of suspicion, produced symptoms of reviving alacrity in the unanimity of action, which the savages detected from their perch on the brink of the falls’ precipice, with puzzled surprise, evinced by the changing increase of numbers, and curious gaze of the watchers. ”

“ Her zeal for the truth was not a blind, headlong enthusiasm, which sparkles, and glitters, and comes to an end, but a zeal founded on the wants and woes of a perishing world. She measured the depths of heathen degradation and estimated the worth of souls, and went to work calmly, philosophically, and earnestly. ”

“ Nothing indeed has exercised a more simple power of persuasion hitherto than the error of Being, as it was formulated by the Eleatics for instance: in its favour are every word and every sentence that we utter!—Even the opponents of the Eleatics succumbed to the seductive powers of their concept of Being. ”

“ If you sit in silence where your face is visible, your nice air-castles are all at once tumbled down by some one exclaiming ‘Why what is the matter? Yon look so grave.’ And then you start and look foolish, answering stupidly, or begin an account of your thoughts, which cannot possibly interest any one but your own self. ”

“ These orations, however, having no basis of thought or force of argument, and, indeed, having nothing but their sensuous beauty of expression to recommend them, fell flat upon the ears of an unsympathetic audience, composed mainly of men whose brains were larger and of tougher fibre. ”

“ The literary instinct, of almost equal disorder with dramatic instinct, and which he had come to despise during the past year, returned with the easy conformity of an undesirable acquaintance—that reportorial sentence-making faculty, strong as death, and as uncentering to the soul of man. ”

“ Whichever groups of sensations within a soul awaken most readily, begin to speak, and give the word of command—these decide as to the general order of rank of its values, and determine ultimately its list of desirable things. ”

“ If I have occasionally given way to those erratic flights of fancy which led me to believe myself a scion of a noble house, well born and nurtured, with wealth at my command and a high station in store, all these delusions were nothing to the creative efforts of her imagination, who commenced by reminding me of a hundred people who never existed, and places and incidents which were all as unreal. ”

“ Every principle, however quietly and unobtrusively treasured,—every feeling, however cautiously concealed,—is now afloat; and the most careless observer may expect to see, with little trouble, the genuine temper of the people. ”

“ The supers jabbering on the scene are there, children of presentiment and fear, to make us aware of a third, the mysterious one, whose name is not on the bills. They come to warn us by the nervous check and hurry of their gossip of the approach of that background power. ”

“ I know very well, that, among our cool and calculating people, where every man mounts guard over himself, where heats and panics and abandonments are quite out of the system, there is a good deal of scepticism as to extraordinary influence. To talk of an overpowering mind rouses the same jealousy and defiance which one may observe round a table where anybody is recounting the marvellous anecdotes of mesmerism. Each auditor puts a final stroke to the discourse by exclaiming, “Can he mesmerize me?” So each man inquires if any orator can change his convictions. ”

“ Generated by the propelling and purifying forces of a mysterious Faith, born of delusion or malice, winning a fleeting notoriety derived from the precarious advantages of wealth, fame or fortune, these movements sponsored by deluded, self-seeking adventurers find themselves, sooner or later, enmeshed in the machinations of their authors, are buried in shame, and sink eventually into complete oblivion. ”

“ I have been told of men, the victims of a spectral illusion, who could move about a saloon, and smile, and talk, and listen, with their awful tormentor gliding always about them and spying out all their ways. ”

“ Let us be characteristic in tone even to the point of foolishness! If by means of tones we allow plenty of scope for guessing, this will be put to the credit of our intellects. Let us irritate nerves, let us strike them dead: let us handle thunder and lightning,—that is what overthrows.... ”

“ And what to the mass of men would have been only one of many allowable follies—a transient fascination, to be dispelled by daylight and contact with those common facts of which common-sense is the reflex—was to him a spiritual convulsion. ”

“ And when, in addition, there exists some moral excitement,—when, as in these Spirit-rapping and Table-turning experiments, the intellect is partially paralysed by fear or wonder correct observation becomes next to an impossibility. ”

“ These men, restless, hasty and jerky in their movements, starting at every sound, constantly looking for something behind their backs, trying to fill up that mysterious void into which they were too terrified to look, by superfluous gesticulations—were new, strange men, whom I did not know. ”

“ But may there not be a more or less vague and evanescent sense of tension, and some psychic fact which may be regarded as the shadowy forerunner of the consciousness of the release of tension which, on a higher plane, reveals itself as the consciousness of will? There may be: introspection is not capable of answering the question, and one is forced to fall back upon an argument from analogy. ”

“ He had absolutely become, himself, with his perceptions and his mistakes, his concessions and his reserves, the ridiculous mixture, as it must seem to them, of his braveries and his fears, the general spectacle of his art and his innocence, almost an added link, and certainly a common, priceless ground for them to meet upon. ”

“ My temper is not very susceptible of enthusiasm, and the enthusiasm which I do not feel I have ever scorned to affect. But at the distance of twenty-five years I can neither forget nor express the strong emotions which agitated my mind as I first approached and entered the Eternal City. ”

“ When these gentry hold forth, by the hour, about their convictions and their theories, their beliefs and disbeliefs, their likings and dislikings, their tastes and their principles, their souls, their minds, and their bodies—if, in despair, you at last, by way of a change, turn the conversation towards some one else, they become loftily silent. ”

“ They set themselves before the eyes of all not alone as models for imitation to many, but as fearful and yet delightful spectacles on the boundary line between this world and the next world, where in that period everyone thought he saw at one time rays of heavenly light, at another fearful, threatening tongues of flame. ”