Influx

“ The influence that goes out from an individual or mass of individuals, we mean—that subtle, invisible power that acts from one upon another, and which when aggregated is almost irresistible? You have felt it in a company moved by a single impulse which carried you for a time with the rest, though all your calmer convictions were in opposition to the movement. ”

“ Influence is of two kinds, Direct and Indirect—Conscious and Unconscious,—The first is influence we deliberately put forth, as when we meet a man and argue with him, as when the orator addresses the multitude, or the politician seeks to gain their suffrages. The second is the influence which radiates from us, whether we will it or not, as fire burning warms a room, or icebergs floating down from the frozen north change the temperature where they come. ”

“ Force indicates the degree of energy a particular thought arouses in an individual. Pitch includes slide or inflection, and indicates the feeling aroused by the thought. Volume indicates the condition of the will—whether it is perfectly free or struggling against difficulties. Time indicates the value the intellect places upon the thought. ”

“ That thought, reflection, articulate utterance and understanding be awakened in these individual million heads, which are the atoms of your Chaos: there is no other way of illuminating any Chaos! The sum-total of intelligence that is found in it, determines the extent of order that is possible for your Chaos,—the feasibility and rationality of what your Chaos will dimly demand from you, and will gladly obey when proposed by you! ”

“ Once in the middle of each week a Law of Nature compels us to move to and fro with a rhythmic motion of more than usual violence, which continues for the time you would take to count a hundred and one. In the midst of this choral dance, at the fifty-first pulsation, the inhabitants of the Universe pause in full career, and each individual sends forth his richest, fullest, sweetest strain. ”

“ But if you look closer, you will see that in each one of those established principal currents there are countless thousands—millions—of tiny currents all turning and twisting across, and back, and up, and down in every direction,—weaving themselves together,—pulling themselves apart,—criss-crossing, clashing,—interlacing,—tangled and confused,—and these are the individual lives. ”

“ The instinctive impulses determine the ends of all activities and supply the driving-power by which all mental activities are sustained; and all the complex intellectual apparatus of the most highly developed mind is but a means toward those ends, is but the instrument by which these impulses seek their satisfactions.... These impulses are the mental forces that maintain and shape all the life of individuals and societies, and in them we are confronted with the central mystery of life and mind and will. ”

“ That a constant, but almost imperceptible change is hourly taking place in the earth's surface, appears to be established; and independent of the extraordinary bouleversements, which have at intervals convulsed our globe, this gradual revolution has produced, and will produce again, a total alteration in the face of nature. ”

“ Change, and the thing men call growth, was in the air. Perhaps in its own way revolution was in the air, the silent, the real revolution that grew with the growth of the towns. In the stirring, bustling town of Bidwell that quiet summer night something happened that startled men. ”

“ Every phenomenon in social and national life (as in Nature) is an effect, and all these effects are embodied by a cause which is not remote and detached, but which is the immediate soul and life of the effect itself. ”

“ Like a set piece of fireworks, with its interdependent parts taking fire in turn, function after function, spectacle after spectacle, glittered, fizzed, and was extinguished, only to give place to newer and more splendid spectacles; separate circles, sets, and groups belonging to the social solar system whizzed, revolved, rotated, with edifying effects on everybody concerned, unconcerned, and not at all concerned ”

“ An act of volition, whether followed by an effect or not, is accompanied by a consciousness of effort, "of force exerted, of power in action, which is necessarily causal, or causative." This feeling of energy or force, inherent in an act of will, is knowledge a priori; assurance, prior to experience, that we have the power of causing effects. ”

“ Force, too, will not be unvaryingly applied, but will be greater or less according as energy or passion may demand. In stress the equable concrete will give place to the radical or to the final, to express energetic resolve; or, in the language of pathos, exaltation, reverence, supplication, and so on, to the median—the most effective of all modes for the expression of such deep feeling as is compatible with slow utterance. ”

“ That, I say again, is at the first encounter the peculiar American effect that began directly I stepped aboard the liner, and that rises here to a towering, shining, clamorous climax. The sense of inexhaustible supply, of an ultra-human force behind it all, is, for a time, invincible. ”

“ The masses moved before us precisely as a crowd of human beings yields to a pressure or a danger on any given point; the vacuum created by its passage filling in its rear as the water of the ocean flows into the track of the keel. ”

“ Under the theory of concentration, the modes of expression—gesture, music, modelling, painting, drawing, speech and writing, are used as the direct and immediate means of intensifying intrinsic thought, and under these impulses and stimuli the technical forms of expression in each mode are adequately acquired.
“The central and sole design of concentration is the harmonious development of individual character—knowledge, skill, are means, not ends—the eternal is the end. ”

“ It is remarkable how few events or crises there are in our histories; how little exercised we have been in our minds; how few experiences we have had. I would fain be assured that I am growing, apace and rankly, though my very growth disturb this dull equanimity,—though it be with struggle through long, dark, muggy nights or seasons of gloom. ”

“ For, in enumerating them, we run through the full circle of active forces; and when the race, the environment, and the moment have been considered—that is to say the inner mainspring, the pressure from without, and the impulsion already acquired—we have exhausted not only all real causes but again all possible causes of movement. ”

“ Change rising above change—cycle growing out of cycle, in majestic progression—each new one ever widening, like the circles that wreathe from a spark of flame, enlarging as they ascend, finally to become lost in the empyrean! ”

“ We have been brought to the idea of such a correlation between the two impulsions that the action of the one establishes and limits at the same time the action of the other, and that each of them, taken in isolation, does arrive at its highest manifestation just because the other is active. ”

“ So the vulgar crowd rushes on, with plenty of kinetic force, making noise enough and looking very busy; while those who seem to sleep in calm forgetfulness, exercise their potential energy, and do the real work of turning the great engine of the State. ”

“ Sympathetic influence enters into our system of thought as a matter of course, and affects our conduct as surely as water affects the growth of a plant. The kindred spirit can turn on a system of lights, to recur to the image of the last chapter, and so transform the mental illumination. This is the nature of all authority and leadership, as I shall try to explain more fully in another chapter. ”

“ This is the curse of 'influences'—the magnetic currents of other brains which set our own awry, and make half the trouble and mischief in the world. Not one soul in a hundred thousand has force or courage to resist them! ”

“ This intermittent trickle of messages, this whispering of a record needle in the stillness of the mountain slopes, is the first warning of such a change in human conditions as mankind has scarcely imagined heretofore. ”

“ Surely, then, in such complex and slowly-evolving movements as those of a nation's life, all the smaller and greater rhythms of which fall within certain general directions, it is impossible that such general directions can be traced by looking at stages that are close together—it is impossible that the effect wrought on any general, direction, by some additional force, can be truly computed from observations extending over but a few years, or but a few generations. ”

“ Au dedans et au dehors le cerveau est entretenu dans une sorte d’ébullition incessante. Les points de vue, les aspects des choses, les combinaisons, les possibilités, tant pour les individus que pour les collectivités, se succèdent si rapidement qu’il faut pour en tenir compte et les utilises au besoin se tenir toujours en éveil et comme en une mobilisation permanente. ”

“ From this tribune, incessantly vibrating, gushed forth perpetually a sort of sonorous flood, a mighty oscillation of sentiments and ideas, which, from billow to billow, and from people to people, flowed to the utmost confines of the earth, to set in motion those intelligent waves which are called souls. ”

“ They recognized the trend of tendencies—great currents of energy which apparently had an existence and control quite independent of, and apart from, human agency. In their view, individual men, so far from guiding the course of events, were borne along by them like leaves by the wind. ”

“ When we attempt to trace the chain of connection through the eye, the brain, and the thoughts—through which line of agencies the chain of cause and effect must necessarily run—we are lost and bewildered. ”

“ When the wind is about to change, an uncertain fluttering and swinging to and fro may be observed in the vanes. So do many organs prove what pure indicators they are, as they shake in the breeze of public opinion. ”

“ Of the numerous influences taking effect every second, for instance, air, electricity, we feel scarcely anything at all. There might be a number of forces, which, though they never make themselves felt by us, yet influence us continually. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The multiplicity of vibrations of another kind may perhaps prevent their admission, or overcome them for a time when admitted, till a shoot of extraordinary energy puts all other vibration to the rout, destroys the vividness of my argumentative conceptions, and rides triumphant in the brain. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Sympathetic action or propagation of similar influence by immediate impulse, is a property of all the natural forms of energy, as well as of mind. Similar actions are propagated thus in all kinds of dead substances, as well as in the living brain. ”

“ Says our scholar: “We are now greeted by the noble strain; a strain unworn by constant quotation, unhackneyed by trite allusions. Like the splendid harmonies of a master-musician it throbs and thrills us as we read, in spite of the declamations of the schoolroom and the parsing exercises of childhood.” ”

“ Movement was the keynote of the picture—stealthy, not-yet-quite-confident pack-movement on the one hand, concentrated here and there in blood-red eddies, and, on the other hand, swift, desperate marches in the open. ”

“ We have analyzed the flame that burns in our lamp, and the flame that burns in the sun, by the same instrument,—connecting by a common affinity, at the same instant and under the same eye, two agents, the farthest removed in place and the most subtle in essence. As we have overcome distances, so we have conquered time, reading the story of antecedent cycles with a confidence equal to that with which we forecast the future ages. ”

“ So far as 'thoughts' and 'feelings' can be active, their activity terminates in the activity of the body, and only through first arousing its activities can they begin to change those of the rest of the world. The body is the storm centre, the origin of co-ordinates, the constant place of stress in all that experience-train. ”

“ The influence of psychical contagion, or the excitation of emotions through involuntary imitation, one person carrying the excitement to another, and so on, through vast audiences, is of special import in relation to human testimony: excitement spreads through a multitude in arithmetical ratio, proportioned to the numbers; a crowd is a multiplier of force, and through the stimulus of sight and sound generates a storm of emotion ”

“ He has done this short-cutting by revolutionary changes in types of energy coming from outside his physical body. In another sphere--communication devices--man has stepped up the movement of his emotions and thoughts and his creative imagination beyond the speed of light. ”

“ So it is with all great movements, philosophies, creeds, fashions, governments, nations, and all else—birth, growth, maturity, decadence, death—and then new-birth. The swing of the pendulum is ever in evidence. ”

“ These changes are manifesting themselves again and again in rhythms peculiar to themselves, and like every other tremendous change, though affecting, more or less, every particle within their sphere of action, they show their effects more intensely upon those particles which are naturally susceptible to their power. ”

“ At intervals some piece—losing its equilibrium under the effect of the consuming fire—would fall with a crushing sound; to be followed by a fresh glare of light, which would continue for a longer or shorter period of time, according to the circumstances that created it. ”