Latent power

“ Others, on the contrary, maintain that all possess the capacity either in an active or in a latent state, that most adults deliberately but innocently inhibit their power, or that, unaware that these powers exist, they fail to take the necessary steps to awaken them from their latent into their active state. ”

“ This is a form of mental energy, but requires the proper mental attitude to make it manifest. We hear of people having wonderful will power, which really is wrong. It should be said that they use their will power while with many it is a latent force. ”

“ What I do say is, that through a want of knowledge of the laws which pertain to subjective mental activity, [Pg 336] the one who exercises that power in the form of mediumship is in constant danger of being led astray. He invokes a power that he knows nothing of,—a power which may, at any time, turn and rend him. ”

“ Again, if the advance in power carry power suddenly far beyond any past desire, or be far greater than any past-remembered advance of power beyond desire—then desire will not come up level easily, but only with difficulty and all manner of [Pg 223] extravagance, such as is likely to destroy the power itself. ”

“ For a sudden, irresistible, convulsive action of the social body, the arm and will of all is needed; the people become a mob, and rush headlong to danger. It can alone suffice to its own danger. What other arm but that of the whole people could stir what it has to stir?—displace what it has [Pg 266] to displace?—install what it desires to found? The monarch would break his sceptre into fragments on it. There must be a lever capable of raising thirty millions of wills—this lever the nation alone possesses. It is in itself the moving power, the fulcrum and the lever. ”

“ You assume danger for the King,—but not danger from the knife of the assassin—or from the schemes of revolutionists! You judge him—as I do—to be in the grasp of the greatest Force which exists in the universe! The force against which there is, and can be no opposition!—a force, which if it once binds even a king—makes of him a life-prisoner, and turns mere ‘temporal power’ to nothingness ”

“ The limits of power must be limits that have been realized in actual persons, and the various ways of unlocking the reserves of power must have been exemplified in individual lives. Laboratory experimentation can play but a small part. Your psychologist's Versuchsthier, outside of hypnosis, can never be called on to tax his energies in ways as extreme as those which the emergencies of life will force on him. ”

“ As nearly as I can make out, the logic of his procedure was something like this:—The world at bottom is a complex of forces, and each pushes itself as far as it can—each on its inner side is a will to power. There is no law over these forces restraining them, but they are held in check by one another. Sometimes order may come from a simple balancing. But some may be stronger than others: there are different levels or gradations of force. ”

“ That power is invisible. It is subject to the cognizance of one of my senses. What are the means that will inform me of what nature it is? He has set himself to counterwork the machinations of this man, who had menaced destruction to all that is dear to me, and whose cunning had surmounted every human impediment. There was none to rescue me from his grasp. My rashness even hastened the completion of his scheme, and precluded him from the benefits of deliberation. ”

“ And, in course of time, all their energy would inevitably be employed in defending themselves against the attacks of their adversaries, totally oblivious of their desire, if ever they had had it, to be merely an educative power. ”

“ Two boys, one the fool of fear, and the other of temerity, were fit antagonists for that stupendous system, whose roots are in the bowels of the earth, and whose head is among the stars,—you escape from a convent! you defy a power that has defied sovereigns! A power whose influence is unlimited, indefinable, and unknown, even to those who exercise it, as there are mansions so vast, that their inmates, to their last hour, have never visited all the apartments;—a power whose operation is like its motto,—one and indivisible. ”

“ And the immense energy created in the human struggle to live and prosper must continually be gathering up, here and there, into visible power that shrewd human hands would surely seize. He felt this now as a law. ”

“ It is said again, that to deny this control “involves the absurdity that our volitions are exerted without any intelligent reasons, and are the result of a brute or senseless mechanism.” It appears to me, however, that a system which represents the will as mechanically governed by motives, as weights turn the scale beam, makes man a machine; while the theory that gives the mind a spontaneous power and energy of its own, makes him what he is, an intelligent, responsible agent. ”

“ The instinct to cleave to something, and the instinct to repel something, are in the inorganic as in the organic world, the uniting bond. The whole distinction is a piece of hasty judgment.
The will to power in every combination of forces, defending itself against the stronger and coming down unmercifully upon the weaker, is more correct. ”

“ Not only conservation of energy, but the mini mum amount of waste; so that the only reality is this: the will of every centre of power to become stronger not self-preservation, but the desire to appropriate, to become master, to become more, to become stronger. ”

“ And suppose that you could establish, as the sole regulators of affairs, those who had the most mental cultivation, do you think they would not like that power well enough to take all means which their superior intelligence could devise to keep it to themselves? ”

“ The secret is that the victims believed in the power of the other person, and feared their power. The greater the belief in, and fear of, the power of the person, the greater the susceptibility to his influence; the greater the sense of power of neutralizing the power, and the disbelief in his power to affect them, the greater the degree of immunity: this is the rule! ”

“ Once indoctrinated into the teachings of the Universal Assembly, any man could tap that Power to a greater or lesser degree, depending on his mental control and ethical attitude. At the top level, a first-class adept could utilize that Power for telepathy, psychokinesis, levitation, teleportation, and other powers that the commander only vaguely understood. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Spencer or any one else deny that, whatever sanction the human and relative conception of "power" draws from the inner certainties of our own sensations, that same, or a still higher, sanction can also be claimed for the conception of an infinite and eternal "Wisdom"? ”

“ I admit that you have a power of extracting confidences. You thought that perhaps you had found in me some interesting phantast who would amuse you. But let me tell you the most profound paradox in the world: if you possess a power, and abuse your power, that power will be taken away from you. ”

“ Every part is negative to the primary power, but positive to all more remote from it than itself. No one of the parts has a power to move itself, and unless there [Pg 139] is a connection maintained between the primary power and the several parts, they will cease to move. ”

“ Why he or she should have the power more than anyone else is a very interesting problem. This power may best be defined as the capacity for allowing the bodily powers, physical or mental, to be used by an outside influence. ”

“ What happens is that certain quanta of power begin to operate, and their essence is to exercise their power over all other quanta of power. Can we assume the existence of a striving after power without a feeling of pleasure and pain, i.e. without the sensation of an increase or a decrease of power? Is mechanism only a language of signs for the concealed fact of a world of fighting and conquering quanta of will-power? All mechanical first-principles, matter, atoms, weight, pressure, and repulsion, are not facts in themselves, but interpretations arrived at with the help of psychical fictions. ”

“ Reserve Power has been watching over him and ever giving him new strength,—even while he sleeps.
If we be conscious of any weakness, and desire to conquer it, we can force ourselves into positions where we must act in a way to strengthen ourselves through that weakness, cut off our retreat, burn our bridges behind us, and fight like Spartans till the victory be ours. ”

“ But if you do not cherish this and do not set it going in the right way, it becomes a lost thing; it grows rusty, and loses its power as a magnet loses its power when it is not sufficiently used. Power that is not at once used, effort that does not at once meet the right object—perishes.”—M., p. ”

“ These were the weapons by which his power became annihilated, and which, in the end, will be the destruction of all potentates who presume to follow his fallacious plan of forming individuals to a system instead of accommodating systems to individuals. ”

“ All this is so well-known and so universally acknowledged that no forbearance on our part can ever by any possibility be misinterpreted as a lack of power or of pluck—or that, in fact, it can appear as anything else than the considerate self-control of conscious strength. ”

“ Such powers of ruthless and complete suppression have vanished. But that is not because power has diminished, but because it has increased and become multitudinous, because it has dispersed itself and specialised. ”

“ The actual mechanism by which society, while it has grown in strength and complexity, has also grown in confusion and disorder, is that peculiarity of the gregarious mind which automatically brings into the monopoly of power the mental type which I have called the {161} stable and common opinion calls normal. ”

“ If we examine precisely what is meant by a Balance of Power, we shall see that it presupposes certain conditions of animosity and attempts to neutralise them by the exhibition of superior or, at all events, equivalent forces. ”

“ On most worlds kings and oligarchs reveled in the primitive satisfaction of arbitrary power. There is an instinct still surviving among men which allows power, as such, to become an end in itself, and when it is attained to be exercised without purpose save for its own display. Some men use power to force abject submission or fawning servility or stark terror. ”

“ The effect of this is to neutralize all of the other person's power so far as its effect on yourself is concerned—you really do not destroy it in him totally. You simply render his forces powerless to affect you. ”

“ Who can refuse to believe that powers which are at work everywhere, which have been at work always, which are so incomparably active, capable, and enduring, must have produced greater effects than a solitary power which is always local in its influence, which has worked, comparatively, but for a short time, which is always slow and feeble in its operations, and which constantly diminishes in intensity? ”

“ Exhausted people will have repose, slackened limbs, peace and quiet—and these things constitute the bliss of Nihilistic religions and philosophies, the wealthy in vital strength, the active, want triumph, defeated opponents, and the extension of their feeling of power over ever wider regions. Every healthy function of the organism has this need,—and the whole organism constitutes an intricate complexity of systems struggling for the increase of the feeling of power.... ”

“ My power has been hostile only to the guilty; and yet with all our lore, how in each step we are reduced to be but the permitted instruments of the Power that vouchsafes our own, but only to direct it. How all our wisdom shrinks into nought, compared with that which gives the meanest herb its virtues, and peoples the smallest globule with its appropriate world. ”

“ But man exercizes that delegated control through secondary agencies, and by means of complicated mechanism. Man's power over the objects of his own devizing is limited. It is according to the curse evoked by Adam's fall, which came through transgression, that by the strain of his muscles, by the sweat of his brow, and by stress of his mind, shall he achieve. ”

“ If, however, this inner summons to activity (diese innere Aufforderung zur Thätigkeit) meets with outer hindrance, especially such a one as the will of the parents, which cannot be set aside, the power is at once weakened in itself, and with many repetitions of this weakening, falls into inaction.”—E., p. ”

“ What will signify a vibration of power if it cannot be used with confidence or energy, and must be again quickly restored to hands which will prostrate much faster than we shall be able to rear under so frail a system? ”

“ Active power, therefore, is a quality in the cause, which enables it to produce the effect. And the exertion of that active power in producing the effect, is called action, agency, efficiency. In order to the production of any effect, there must be in the cause, not only power, but the exertion of that power.”—Essays on the Active Powers, p. 259. Here it is declared by Dr. Reid, that active power or the will must act, in order to produce an effect, whether the effect be in the mind itself, or out of the mind, whether it be “of thought, of will, or of motion.” ”

“ But in order to lose nothing, a power must grow or remain indefinite, for a power which remains stationary is nullified. If it retrogrades, it is under the control of something else, and loses its independent existence. ”