Medium

“ In its last analysis, such a conception of literature amounts to the unimpeded intercourse of mind with mind. Literature would be a language which dispenses with gesture, facial expression, tone of voice; which is, in its halts, accelerations and retardations, emphases and concessions, the apotheosis of conversation. But this clearness,--in the sublime sense, including the ornate and the subtle,--this luminous lucidity,-- is it not quite indeterminate? Clearness is said of a medium. WHAT is it that shines through? ”

“ It is of the essence that they should live in a medium, and in a medium only, since it takes a medium to give them an identity, the intenser the better, and that the medium should subserve them by enjoying in a like degree the luxury of an existence. ”

“ And when the activities expressed are not pleasant, the expression of them in a delightful medium helps to induce us to make them our own and accept them notwithstanding. The medium becomes a charming net to hold us, and because of its allurements we give ourselves the more freely to its spirit within. ”

“ You may appeal simultaneously to two senses, but you must do so in the medium proper to each sense and the intuition must be capable of expression in those media. To appeal to one sense through the medium proper to another is to court disaster. ”

“ Not wholly lacking, of course, as a multitude of beautiful passages testify; yet, in general, it remains true that, in prose, the medium tends to be transparent, sacrificing itself in order that nothing may stand between what it reveals to thought and the imagination. ”

“ If the medium is filled with the idea or notion of producing brilliant or sensational results, he will in all probability so disturb the placidity of the receiving surface of his mind that the latter will fail to register or record the impressions being made upon it by the spirit vibrations. ”

“ The sensuous medium is here, too, in the same way carried out of the sphere of that which is external to ourselves, and at once asserts there the presence of something over and above that which is expressed by our ordinary consciousness, which in its general use treats the time-divisions of tones with indifference or caprice. ”

“ The medium, that is, made diaphanous and motive by colour or sound, acts, by a succession of undulations, upon the eye or the ear, and finally, through the humours of the former and the air in the latter, upon the sentient part of these organs; so that there is an evident analogy between these undulations and the impulses which maintain locomotion until lost in the state of rest. ”

“ The Web.—Literature, although it stands apart by reason of the great destiny and general use of its medium in the affairs of men, is yet an art like other arts. Of these we may distinguish two great classes: those arts, like sculpture, painting, acting, which are representative, or, as used to be said very clumsily, imitative; and those, like architecture, music, and the dance, which are self-sufficient, and merely presentative. ”

“ Physical Phenomena cover a wide range of mediumistic manifestations, among which are movements of tables, the production of "raps," the manifestation of spirit lights, freedom from the effects of fire, the passage of matter through matter, direct writing upon paper or upon slates, direct voices, levitation of the medium, spirit photographs, and the production of the materialized form of the spirit. ”

“ A medium is one whose principles, physical, mental, spiritual, are so loosely bound together that an Astral entity can draw from him without difficulty the matter it requires for manifestation. The very essence of mediumship is the ready separability of the principles. ”

“ Where the medium is inspirational and ready to respond to the thought impulsations of the control, it stands to reason that the transmitted ideas, and the stimulation of the thought-faculties caused by the transference and expression of the spirits' opinions, will not be lost to the medium. 'If you will take one step we can more easily help you to take a second than we could compel you to take the first if you were unprepared,' said a spirit teacher to Mrs. ”

“ The medium, and the mode in which the impression is conveyed through the medium, seem to be different for different qualities; but the existence of the medium leads to certain necessary conditions or alternatives, which have successively made their appearance in science, in the course of the attempts of men to theorize concerning the principal secondary qualities, sound, light, and heat. ”

“ If there be any of my readers who have hitherto been inclined to believe in the professions of the medium, I hope that what I have said will open their eyes, and show them that the so-called materialization of spirits is purely and simply a myth, and that the mediums are nothing more nor less than clever but unprincipled conjurors. ”

“ The object, in short, which fully corresponds to its appeal is the infinite realm of Spirit. For the medium of language, the most plastic medium possessed immediately by conscious life, and the one most competent to grasp its interests and movements in their ideal vitality, precisely as is the case with the material of the other arts, such as stone, colour, and tone, must necessarily and above all be employed to express that which it is most qualified to express. ”

“ A medium is, therefore, a person in presence of whom ‘psychical’ phenomena can be observed. I use this word ‘psychical’ with regret, because it implies a hypothesis.
As a rule it is necessary to experiment with mediums in order to discover them. Their gifts are often latent, and only reveal themselves if conditions favourable to their manifestation are supplied. ”

“ So far I have been speaking of certain conditions of the literary art arising out of the medium or material in or upon which it works, the essential qualities of language and its aptitudes for contingent ornamentation, matters which define scholarship as science and good taste respectively. They are both subservient to a more intimate quality of good style: more intimate, as coming nearer to the artist himself. ”

“ It is sometimes done in a pictorial form, when the medium clearly sees and describes scenes which appear to the vision, such as the appearance and movements of an army, a landscape, a congregation in a cathedral, and so forth....
“The Psychometric Medium has the power of feeling and correctly describing the characteristics of persons with whose spheres he or she is brought into sympathy or contact. ”

“ IN what precedes, we have shown by various considerations that we necessarily and universally assume the perception of secondary qualities to take place by means of a medium interjacent between the object and the person perceiving. Perception is affected by various peculiarities, according to the nature of the quality perceived: but in all cases a medium is equally essential to the process. ”

“ The assumption of a medium is, indeed, an intellectual necessity and the attempt to specify definitely the properties which it must possess in order to fulfill the extraordinary functions assigned to it has afforded a field for the highest display of scientific acumen. ”

“ The proper method of communing with the spirits of the unseen realm is conducive to good, and not evil, to the medium. The co-operative association of medium and spirit on the plane of thought and purpose, emotion and motive, ethics and inspiration, results in the education and elevation of the medium. ”

“ Nature, in passing through the medium of the imagination, is necessarily transposed and in a manner conventionalized; and it is this transposition, this deliberate selection of certain 169 characteristics to the exclusion of others, that distinguishes the work of art from a cast or a photograph. ”

“ Again, apart from the various degrees of the faculty in the mediums, there is mystery hanging over the question of the various degrees of ability of Spirits who may be present—high, low, or of intermediate grade and character—to act through or with a particular medium. ”

“ Many other classifications than these have been attempted, for a work of art presents such a wealth of aspects, that it is quite possible, as has frequently been the case, to make first one and then another the basis of division. For instance, you may take the sensuous medium simply. ”

“ Take, for example, the many recorded cases of automatic writing in languages unknown to the medium, and sometimes requiring special scholarship to appreciate. vii The explanation seems in this case to be that the mind of the medium is plastic to a more direct spiritual influence which can therefore mould its particles and create a new record for itself. ”

“ When, however, we find a modern writer defining the beautiful as "that which has characteristic or individual expressiveness for sense perception or imagination, subject to the conditions of general or abstract expressiveness in the same medium," [55] we feel, or at least I feel, that something must be wrong. ”

“ This kind of mediums will not answer for the purposes of public circles; but if you get one that will answer for such purposes, that medium will be one who is excessively positive—one who can resist influences of ever so positive a character. ”

“ A developed medium can judge for himself, and knows from experience how far to go. It is a favorite trick of a certain class of spirits when they find they have a sensitive who can 'feel' them, to give them that pricking sensation in the arm which denotes their presence. 'So-and-so wants to write,' and away 258rushes the medium for the pencil, and sits down. ”

“ Many mediums simply tell their sitters the ideas, impressions, and "messages" which come into their minds, and which they believe to come from external sources, i.e., "spirits," but which, as a matter of fact, issue from their own subconsciousness. ”

“ Sensation by a Medium.—Objects, as we have just seen, are necessarily apprehended as without us; and in general, as removed from us by a great or small distance. Yet they affect our bodily senses; and this leads us irresistibly to the conviction that they are perceived by means of something intermediate. Vision, or hearing, or smell, or the warmth of a fire, must be communicated to us by some Medium of Sensation. ”

“ Persons calling themselves mediums present certain phenomena, physical and psychical, and call public attention to them, as an evidence of life beyond the grave, and the possibility of spiritual communication between this world and the next. ”

“ Let A be the weight of the globe in vacuo, B its weight in the resisting medium, D the diameter of the globe, F a space which is to 4/3D as the density of the globe to the density of the medium, that is, as A to A - B, G the time in which the globe falling with' the weight B without resistance describes the space F, and H the velocity which the body acquires by that fall. ”

“ He regarded natural or white light as the simplest type of disturbance, being constituted by a simple and uniform pulse at right angles to the direction of propagation, and inferred that colour is generated by the distortion to which this disturbance is subjected in the process of refraction, "The Ray," [30] he says, "is dispersed, split, and opened by its Refraction at the Superficies of a second medium, and from a line is opened into a diverging Superficies, and so obliquated, whereby the appearances of Colours are produced." ”

“ The beauty of form, the varied and vital aspects of religious, social, and individual character, the splendour and charm of a nobly ordered art in temples, speech, manners, and dress, the constant suggestion of the deep humanism behind that art and of the freshness and reality of all its forms of expression,—these things are as much and as great a part of the "Dialogues" as the thought; and they are full of that quality which enriches and ripens the mind that comes under their influence. ”

“ Sight, then, which comprehends all the varieties of colour, is the object, and the only object, of the sense which we are considering. But, simple as it is, of what instruction, and joy, and beauty, and ever-varying magnificence, is it the source! ”

“ According to the classification which I have put before you, then, the subjects of all knowledge are divisible into the two groups, matters of science and matters of art; for all things with which the reasoning faculty alone is occupied, come under the province of science; and in the broadest sense, and not in the narrow and technical sense in which we are now accustomed to use the word art, all things feelable, all things which stir our emotions, come under the term of art, in the sense of the subject-matter of the aesthetic faculty. ”

“ What imagination does, and what the personal vision of the individual artist does, is to deal successfully and masterfully with this "given," this basic element. And this basic element, this permanent common ground, this universal human assumption, is just precisely what, in popular language, we call "Nature"; that substratum of objective reality in the appearances of things, which makes it possible for diversely constructed temperaments to make their differences effective and intelligible. ”

“ We come now to the question of conforming the diction and subject-matter to nature, in which, as was said above, nature must be considered in its double aspect: namely, in relation to the subjects of which we speak, and in relation to the audience by whom we are heard or read. ”

“ As in living creatures, the blood, nourishing the body, determines its very contour and external aspect, just so, to his mind, the matter, the basis, in a work of art, imposed, necessarily, the unique, the just expression, the measure, the rhythm—the form in all its characteristics.
If the style be the man, in all the colour and intensity of a veritable apprehension, it will be in a real sense "impersonal." ”

“ We have seen the artistic spirit working, first in the delightful and technical sphere of language, the sphere of expression as opposed to subject, then controlling the imagination of the poet in dealing with his subject. ”