Focus

“ Some ruling motive—ambition, family cares, or the mere instinctive love of study—has gathered together and focused their vague thoughts and scattered powers; has brought about the habit of reflection, and turned their thoughts towards the great problem of life; has given to all a purpose, and a path to travel, and left them no time to mourn the vanished past. ”

“ The object to be examined is placed on a little shelf projecting from the stand, half an inch below the tube, and reduced to the nearer focus by a plain mirror, placed at half a right angle to the axis of the speculum, at the distance of 11/2 inch from it. The image, formed in the farther focus, is viewed through a lens, which may be changed at pleasure, so as to increase or diminish the magnifying power, the object remaining unmoved, which gives this instrument a great advantage, in point of convenience, over the common compound refracting microscope. ”

“ To these four sections, the four operations of the soul correspond,—conjecture, faith, understanding, reason. As every pool reflects the image of the sun, so every thought and thing restores us an image and creature of the supreme Good. ”

“ The Image of God was not seated in the features of your face but in the lineaments of your soul. In the knowledge of your powers, inclinations, and principles, the knowledge of yourself chiefly consisteth. ”

“ Invoke the aid of reason, of habit, of the senses, the head, the heart, and explain it if you can. You will find nothing but two bodies, one here, the other there, and between them, what? Air, space, immensity. O blind fools! who fondly imagine yourselves men, and who reason of love! ”

“ Desires and Interests.—These complexes of thinking, feeling, and willing make up the conscious desires and interests that mould the individual life. Through the processes of attention to the stimuli that act upon human nature, discrimination between them, association of [346] impressions and ideas that come from present and past experience, and deliberate judgments of value, the mind moves to action for the satisfaction of personal desires and interests. ”

“ Down below them, is another question which is included in them all and which sooner or later must be faced by each and every one of us: "Why am I here on earth? Has my life any purpose in the great, everlasting scheme of things? What is that purpose?" ”

“ Study the heart and the mind of man, and begin with your own. Meditation and reflection must lay the foundation of that knowledge: but experience and practice must, and alone can, complete it. Books, it is true, point out the operations of the mind, the sentiments of the heart, the influence of the passions ”

“ It is within the bounds of the same occupation that the greatest contrasts, the greatest distance, the greatest gulfs of feeling are to be found. I value an otherwise painful experience because it exhibited that philosophic truth in so vivid and striking a manner. ”

“ Ah, but what, we must ask ourselves, of the great brain that conceived the idea, the foresight which told the exact moment when to put it into action, the cool courage which seized the moment—what of the grasp of affairs, the knowledge of men? ”

“ With the development of this soul-vision, judgment and mental penetration will be incalculably increased, and there will evolve within you that prophetic vision by the aid of which you will be able to sense coming events, and to forecast, with remarkable accuracy, the result of your efforts.
And in just the measure that you alter from within will your outlook upon life alter; and as you alter your mental attitude towards others they will alter in their attitude and conduct toward you. ”

“ You can change the setting of your mental stage from portentous gloom to sun-lit assurance. You can concentrate your thought upon the useful, [Pg 63] the helpful and the cheerful, ignore the useless and annoying, and make your life a life of hope and joy, of promise and fulfilment. ”

“ Look deeper into the interior of experience itself. There, if you only look deeper than all ordinary and partial immediacy, deeper than colors and sounds, and deeper than mortal love, then when once rightly prepared, you shall find a fact, an immediate and ineffable fact, such that it wholly satisfies every longing, answers every inquiry, and fulfils the aim of every thought. ”

“ Have you, in these past days, and do you, as a matter of habitual and familiar occupation of your mind, let your eyes travel on beyond and above the low levels of earth and peradventures, to fix them on that certainty? ”

“ What he has thought and what he has done become objective: thought-forms, having been consciously visualized and allowed to take root and grow and blossom and produce, now pass in a solemn and mighty panorama, as the consciousness-content of his personality. ”

“ But when such observation is ended or at fault, and the man retreats, as it were, into his inner self, then in the quiet all the senses merge and harmonize into a single perfect instrument of perception. ”

“ Nothing is more striking, in the light and shadow of the human drama, than [10] to compare the inner life and thoughts of elevated and silent natures with the thoughts and plans which those by whom they are surrounded have of and for them. ”

“ If we would have our resolutions take effect, we must take heed unto our ways, set a watch before the door of our lips, and examine the motions that arise in our heart, whence they come, and whither they go; whether it be pride or passion, or any corrupt humour, that prompteth us to any design, and whether God will be pleased with it? ”

“ They were meant to know, to act, and to feel—to know everything which the mind is able to contemplate, to name, and to classify; to do everything which the will, prompted by the passions and guided by the conscience, can undertake; and, subject to the same guidance, to feel in its utmost vigor every emotion which the contemplation of the various persons and objects which surround us can excite. ”

“ A recent able author speaks of "that congeries of organs whose union forms the brain and whose action constitutes the mind." 10 The mind, then, is an action! Can an action love and hate, choose and resolve, rejoice and grieve, remember, repent, and pray? Is not an agent necessary for an action? ”

“ I mean by this that the conceiving or theorizing faculty—the mind's middle department—functions exclusively for the sake of ends that do not exist at all in the world of impressions we receive by way of our senses, but are set by our emotional and practical subjectivity altogether. [2] It is a transformer of the world of our impressions into a totally different world,—the world of our conception; and the transformation is effected in the interests of our volitional nature, and for no other purpose whatsoever. ”

“ Among the chief of these causes is to be reckoned a principle which must be well known to those who have made any of the Arts the object of accurate reflection; namely, the pleasure which the mind derives from the perception of similitude in dissimilitude. This principle is the great spring of the activity of our minds, and their chief feeder. ”

“ By the cognitive element, which is equally necessary with emotions to the existence of a valuable appreciation, I mean merely the actual cognition or consciousness of any or all of an object’s beautiful qualities—that is to say, any or all of those elements in the object which possess any positive beauty. ”

“ The simple study of psychology reveals that the activities of the will must be stirred up by approaching and capturing the outlying sentinels, namely the intellect and feelings. We [75] get attention through the senses, increase attention to interest through the intellect, change interest to desire through the feelings, and finally, in decision we have induced the will to act. ”

“ We have merely the desire of knowing the scene before us,—the selection of some prominent object, or rather the mere perception of it, as peculiarly prominent,—the desire of knowing it particularly,—and the contraction of a few muscles, in obedience to our volition. ”

“ If again you ask, For what purpose does he desire to be high above the ground, you will receive the answer that he wishes to appear high in the eyes of those who see him. For what purpose does he wish to appear higher in the eyes of those who see him? ”

“ But when we take a survey of the more sublime parts of the human frame; when we behold man's internal make and structure; his mental faculties; his social propensions, and those active powers which set all in motion—the passions,—what an illustrious display of consummate wisdom is presented to our admiring view! ”

“ This instrument of research I find to be the use, by the human person, of all the various energies of personality concentrated into one point; and the resultant spectacle of things or reality of things, which this concentrated vision makes clear, I call the original revelation of the complex vision of man. ”

“ This generalised form of attention, which we attribute to the Absolute Experience, is now conceived by us as that aspect of this Absolute which, in the total movement of the world’s unity, determines the ideas to find this concrete realisation which they do find. ”

“ And, as the impressions of reflection, viz. passions, desires, and emotions, which principally deserve our attention, arise mostly from ideas, 'twill be necessary to reverse that method, which at first sight seems most natural; and, in order to explain the nature and principles of the human mind, give a particular account of ideas, before we proceed to impressions. ”

“ Perceiving is the first rung on the ladder that leads to action, feeling is the second, action is the topmost rung, the primary goal, as it were, of all the climbing. For the purpose of our discussion this is perhaps the simplest way of looking at human behaviour. ”

“ The growth of intellection and self-consciousness reacts powerfully upon the emotional and active side of mind. To Conduct. describe the various sources of feeling and of desire that thus arise—aesthetic, social and religious sentiments, pride, ambition, selfishness, sympathy, &c.—is beyond the scope of systematic psychology, and certainly quite beyond the limits of an article like the present. But at least a general résumé of the characteristics of activity on this highest or rational level is indispensable. ”

“ The standpoint from which my values are determined: is abundance or desire active? ... Is one a mere spectator, or is one's own shoulder at the wheel—is one looking away or is one turning aside? ... Is one acting spontaneously, as the result of accumulated strength, or is one merely reacting to a goad or to a stimulus? ”

“ Spread on a canvas, with other paints around it, it represents, on the contrary, a feature in a picture and performs a spiritual function. Just so, I maintain, does a given undivided portion of experience, taken in one context of associates, play the part of a knower, of a state of mind, of ‘consciousness’; while in a different context the same undivided bit of experience plays the part of a thing known, of [Pg 10] an objective ‘content.’ In a word, in one group it figures as a thought, in another group as a thing. ”

“ It is obvious that in everyday life when by arguments, persuasion, suggestion, punishment, exhortation, or prayer we change the viewpoint of a person, we do so by building up complexes which shall act as settings and give new meanings to his ideas. I 369may add, if we wish to sway him to carry this new viewpoint to fulfilment through action we introduce into the complex an emotion which by the driving force of its impulses shall carry the ideas to practical fruition. ”

“ And in that day shall be discovered every inward working of every human soul: every appetite, passion, inclination, affection, with the various combinations of them, with every temper and disposition that constitute the whole complex character of each individual. ”

“ The operation of reflection which hinders tendencies and maintains them in the shape of ideas, which compares ideas and which only decides after this deliberation, constitutes the highest form of the medium operations of the human mind. ”

“ IN education there has to be encountered at every turn the play of motives. Now, the theory of motives is the theory of sensation, emotion, and will; in other words, it is the psychology of the sensitive and the active powers. ”

“ An idea comes to me, or I to it', she says, airily, 'a scene—a situation—a young man, a young woman, and on that mental hint I begin to build', but the question naturally arises, she must make a beginning? ”

“ Rather the purpose is to bring together in brief form the thoughts of some wise minds and the insight and appreciation of some deep characters, trained in the actual world of experience but attaining a vision of life in clear and wide perspective. ”

“ The motives that lead us to conceive Reality as a Well-Ordered Series, and as a realm of Appreciation, that is of values, of Selfhood, of life other than the life that is directly revealed to us, by our present conscious purposes, and so as a realm of various Selves. These twofold motives correspond to our own twofold limitations as finite beings. ”

“ But if we take reason strictly, not for the faculty of mental perception in general, but for ratiocination, or a power of inferring by arguments; I say, if we take reason thus, the perceiving of spiritual beauty and excellency no more belongs to reason than it belongs to the sense of feeling to perceive colors, or to the power of seeing to perceive the sweetness of food. ”

“ At bottom the process is one of conception, and is everywhere, even in the sphere of simple sensible qualities, the same as that by which we are usually understood to attain to the notions of abstract goodness, perfect felicity, absolute power, and the like: the direct perception of a difference between compounds, and the imaginary prolongation of the direction of the difference to an ideal terminus, the notion of which we fix and keep as one of our permanent subjects of discourse. ”

“ Good dispositions in the domains of will, sentiment, judgment, imagination, perseverance, duty, accuracy, self-control, the faculty of thinking logically and distinguishing the true from the false, the faculty of combining æsthetic thoughts and sensations, all constitute human values which are much superior to the faculty of rapid assimilation or receptivity, and a good memory for words and phrases. ”