Human energy

“ Granting that the human being takes in energy as food and drink and builds it up into dischargeable tissues, we are not further concerned with the details of its physiology. How does the feeling of energy arise, what increases the energy discharge and what blocks, inhibits or lowers it? For from day to day, from hour to hour, we are conscious either of a desire to be active, a feeling of capacity or the reverse. We depend on that feeling of capacity to guide us, and though it is organic, it has its mysterious disappearances and marvelous reenforcements. ”

“ Successive stages, from food gathering to trading and manufacturing, required more energy--human energy, animal energy, and eventually mechanical energy. Part of this energy enabled humans to survive, another part enabled them to multiply. ”

“ Energy, which is the source of our work, is perhaps the most general term that there is in the world. Behind everything, we say, there is energy. Behind the activities of our physical bodies there is energy to an extent that those who have not studied medicine or other physical sciences do not always recall.
Eighty per cent of any human being's body is made up of water. ”

“ This physical universe is permeated by energy lanes which effectively activate material creation, even as the human body is nourished and energized by the circulatory distribution of the assimilable energy products of nourishment. ”

“ Because of the law, the conservation of energy, which shows that no energy in the universe can be lost, it is possible to study, with great accuracy, the energy produced in, and given off by, the human body. ”

“ The business of the universe about us consists in the Transmission of Energy. Some of it is temporarily and partially arrested in material compositions; some is more actively expressed in vegetable and animal form; this stage of expression we call Life. We ourselves, the human animals, were specially adapted for high efficiency in storing and transmitting this energy; and so were able to enter into a combination still more efficient; that is, into social relations. Humanity, man in social relation, is the best expression of the Energy that we know. ”

“ Mechanical philosophers have suggested the possibility of accumulating and treasuring up for human use some of the greater natural forces, which the action of the elements puts forth with such astonishing energy. ”

“ Modern science says: The sun is the past, the earth is the present, the moon is the future. From an incandescent mass we have originated, and into a frozen mass we shall turn. Merciless is the law of nature, and rapidly and irresistibly we are drawn to our doom. ”

“ Though we may never be able to comprehend human life, we know certainly that it is a movement, of whatever nature it be. The existence of movement unavoidably implies a body which is being moved and a force which is moving it. Hence, wherever there is life, there is a mass moved by a force. All mass possesses inertia, all force tends to persist. ”

“ Giving now to the ether its storehouse of tremendous power, and giving to it the ability to transfer this power to ordinary matter upon opportunity, and we have an environment compared with which the strongest steel is but the breath of the summer air. In presence of such an energy it is that we live and move; in the midst of such tremendous power do we act. Is it a wonder that out of such a reservoir the power by which we live should irresistibly rush into the organism and appear as the transmuted energy which we recognize in the phenomena of life? ”

“ This is only another version of the old story that energy is our strong point and favourable characteristic, rather than intelligence. But we may give to this idea a more general form still, in which it will have a yet larger range of application. We may regard this energy driving at practice, this paramount sense of the obligation of duty, self-control, and work, this earnestness in going manfully with the best light we have, as one force. ”

“ Another of these reasons was that I was led to recognize the transmission of electrical energy to any distance through the media as by far the best solution of the great problem of harnessing the sun's energy for the uses of man. For a long time I was convinced that such a transmission on an industrial scale, could never be realized, but a discovery which I made changed my view. I observed that under certain conditions the atmosphere, which is normally a high insulator, assumes conducting properties, and so becomes capable of conveying any amount of electrical energy. ”

“ And when that is accomplished, not by me but by the intelligence of mankind, then I shall make a present to the world of a new mechanical energy. This is my discovery. This Energon is nothing more nor less than the cosmic energy that resides in the solar rays. When it is harnessed by mankind it will do the work of the world. There will be no more multitudes of miners slaving out their lives in the bowels of the earth, no more sooty firemen and greasy engineers. All may dress in white if they so will. ”

“ In its ultimate essence, energy may be incomprehensible by us, except as an exhibition of the direct operation of that which we call Mind and Will. In these final inquiries into the nature of things, the wisest of us can merely speculate, and the majority but dimly apprehend. ”

“ What power, in sum, Can raise with agile leap our body aloft, Save energy of mind which steers the limbs? Now seest thou not how powerful may be A subtle nature, when conjoined it is With heavy body, as air is with the earth Conjoined, and energy of mind with us? ”

“ We direct the currents of falling water, of heat and of steam; nature imparts the force or energy to which man has only given a new direction. We are now imparting new directions to the force that we call electricity, and to what we call cold. What is the force from which we derive this power of transforming physical energy? May we not call it mental energy? Is not mental energy the factor in mankind by which he is differentiated from the beast? Does not man only accumulate experience, and is there any limit to the power of mind over matter? ”

“ There is a constant flow of energy around your planet. The entire cosmos is energy. We, too, are energy. Swim in it! Feel yourself as a pulsating, living part of the universal energy; feel yourself to be in tune with this energy — to be flowing along with it, in harmony with it. If you become disturbed or distressed, you have stepped out of the flow. If you go against your conscience, you will go against the flow and be pushed out of it. ”

“ And then let us realize that the vital energy or Prana that man uses in his life work is but a portion of that great universal energy which permeates everything and everywhere, the portion being used by us at any particular moment being drawn from the universal supply, and again passing out from us into the great ocean of force or energy. ”

“ In point of fact, however, I am in relation with the energetic system not merely or primarily as an Intelligence percipient of the transmutations proceeding in it at a particular point, but also as a Will initiative to some extent of such transmutations and capable of influencing and directing the physical process. Life necessarily involves a process of energetic transmutation constantly proceeding at that portion of the system of Energy which constitutes my organism, and I am there related as Will with a larger system which embraces the part in which intelligence is developed. ”

“ Life itself, it should be observed, is energy, yea, the primal energy of the living creature and so is the whole economy of the living creature, its functions of nutrition and growth, that is, the vegetative side of its nature, and the movement stirred by impulse, that is, the sentient side, and its activity of intellect and free-will. Energy, moreover, is the perfect realisation of power. ”

“ Your energy can tip the scales when you add it to thousands of others' — merging, slowly raising our collective consciousness to the point of power when it makes the all-important difference!
This survival energy spreads far beyond those involved and touches every life on Earth! ”

“ Looking at the same phenomena in his humanist mood, he sees the flux and transformation of forces take on and assume a definite design and purpose, which the very logic of his science compels him to postulate as an inherent potency in the very system of energies. He sees every form of energy a potential slave of man. He sees the cities scattered over the face of the globe, as the supreme, the collective, the ceaseless effort of the race to realise this potency of energy, to harness it in the service of man. ”

“ Take an illustration of the way in which this reserve or potential energy is transformed into circulating or kinetic energy. Suppose that you are a countryman and come to live in a large city. The speed with which we do things, our habits of quick decision, the whirlwind of activities of the busy man in town, appal you. You cannot see how we live through it. A day in the business district fills you with terror. ”

“ Today we know that the world in which we live is nothing but a great sea of energy which, in the undifferentiated, is called God, and in the differentiated is called matter or form, or, to make it more simple, we can call one the energy that creates, and the other the things created from and by this energy.
Man and his environment are created by this energy: He is a localized center of force and he becomes the expression in form of just whatever he relates with under the law of cosmic correspondence. ”

“ Consider how one form of Energy may be transformed into another, and so on around the circle, the one principle producing the entire chain of appearances. Realize that the energy within you by which you move and act, is but one of the forms of this great Principle of Energy with which the Universe is filled, and that you may draw to you the required Energy from the great Universal supply. But above all endeavor to grasp the idea of the Oneness pervading the world of Energy or Force, or Motion. ”

“ I may not be able to reconcile the metaphysical speculations of the different schools of philosophy by explanations that will satisfy others, but I can satisfy myself on one point. This is, that power, force, energy, causation, are all attributes of mind, and can exist in a mind only. Let us pass for a moment from abstract reasoning to an illustration drawn from familiar objects. A ton of coal contains a certain amount of what is scientifically called energy. This energy becomes developed by combustion, which liberates heat. ”

“ Feeling accordingly must have originated, and the question how feeling originates is a problem that suggests itself naturally to the psychologist as well as the philosopher.
#Vital energy a unique form of energy.#
The kinetic energy liberated in our actions, in brain-activity as well as muscular motions, is produced from the potential energy stored up in our tissues. This energy, qua energy, is the same energy which we meet everywhere in nature. All kinds of energy are interconvertible. ”

“ We are now prepared to answer the question, What are the sources of the principle of energy? All knowledge of nature is derived in the last instance from experience. In this sense they are right who look upon the principle of energy as a result of experience. ”

“ The ultimate source of energy and change?—Hence the fundamental question of philosophy amounts to this: What is the ultimate source of Energy? Energy manifests itself in producing change. What is the nature of this power which produces changes, and makes the world to be a process of unceasing change? According to the realistic theory, change is self-existent in the form of motion, and no explanation can be given. According to the idealistic theory, it is the self-realising power of Idea that makes change. ”

“ We can compare warmth and mechanical work, because the one can be transformed into the other according to a strict law of equivalence. But we cannot compare a tone with a sensation of light, or a visual idea with a chord, because a transformation of the one of these practical contents into the other is unthinkable. Now physical values are subject to the principle of the conservation of energy because of the unlimited capacity for transformation of physical energies according to equivalent relations. ”

“ Thought is at any rate in some sense a power, and to some degree measurable. Recent discoveries of the dependence of capacity for mental exertion upon physical vitality and measurements of chemical energy received into the system [238] as food, and somehow exhausted by the activities of thought, have lent plausibility to the hypothesis of a universal energy of which physical and "psychical" processes are alike manifestations. And the conception of energy seems capable not only of unifying nature, but also of satisfying the metaphysical demand for an efficient and moving cause. ”

“ We need no argument here—for all will readily recognize that behind the physical action of man, animal and plant, lies Life and Mind, and that therefore all Force and Energy arising from such action must be manifestations of Vital-Mental Action. ”

“ But when the normal tasks and stimulations of life don't put a man's deeper levels of energy on tap, and he requires distinctly deleterious excitements, his constitution verges on the abnormal. The normal opener of deeper and deeper levels of energy is the will. ”

“ The Doctrine of Energy.
And if the most advanced philosophy should yet be confirmed as true that there is nothing really but energy, none the less would the doctrine of the Holy Spirit abide. Back of all the individual energies of humanity; back of all the forces of nature is the supreme energy of God. ”