Undue influence

“ But the question may be asked, "Do we not admit a similar principle when we speak of a man's influence as something that survives him?" We answer, "No." Influence is a simple radiation of impressions. ”

“ They want influence through office, or influence toward special ends, or influence with particular persons. “Can’t you see you are destroying your influence?” they cry, while every stroke is telling. “A thinks you are a lunatic.” ”

“ Secondly, we discharge or emit an influence, silent and invisible, that no doubt affects other people. They are probably not aware of it, but they are either repelled or attracted by this silent influence. ”

“ It seems as if we were somehow being drawn within an influence, and an influence the more weird and inexplicable that it is through an agency that we should traditionally hold as something inferior, and therefore quite absurd to take seriously. ”

“ Now, in the case of most of us, this tide of unconscious influence flowing from us without any deliberate or set purpose on our part, our involuntary contribution to the common life, is far more powerful for good or for evil than anything which we ever do by way of active purpose to influence another’s life, and this because our unconscious influence is the reflex on the outer world of what we are in ourselves; it is the projection, or shall we say the radiation, of our own life, its tastes, tempers, habits, and character, upon the lives around us. ”

“ There comes to you an acquisition of power. Your influence, by a process which escapes any human analysis, reaches out over your associates, and, in proportion to the magnitude of your character, over humanity. ”

“ Who shall set a limit to the influence of a human being? ”

“ The direct influence a passive, merely receptive spirit would have accepted, and gratefully, was soon felt as an intolerable burden by a mind in many ways different from her own, but with the same imperious instinct of freedom, and as little capable of playing anvil to another mind for long. ”

“ For the time being, we may stop at this point: that the startling changes which have occurred recently in moral standards and point-of-view are directly traceable to a corresponding weakening of an influence that has been one of the strongest in human lives. ”

“ In this way all lower and undesirable influences from both the seen and the unseen side of life are closed out, while all higher influences are invited, and in the degree that they are invited will they enter. ”

“ In proportion as the avarice of man has tightened the chain around his victim, has its degrading and depressing influence infused itself into his principles and habits, withered all his energies, and impeded the growth of every thing noble and elevated in his character. ”

“ But this exclusion is itself activity, movement; and thus the positive, because of its very positiveness, is no longer the positive but the negative. By excluding the negative from itself, it excludes itself from itself, and destroys itself. ”

“ We have further seen that the situation breaks up this determinate form in opposition, obstruction, development, and disruption, so that the emotional life feels itself compelled by the force of the affecting circumstances to react with energy against this disturbing and restraining influence, which stands in the way of its objects and passions. ”

“ That this long stream of influence, ever widening and deepening, is at last about to sweep away the barriers it has so long sapped, is at least one obvious interpretation of the present universal ferment of men's minds as to the imperfections of present social arrangements. ”

“ It may influence millions, for ages--ennobling, elevating, or degrading individuals and nations. Thus the spirits of the past, the forces of nature, even our own actions and thoughts become an inalienable, component part of the soul, influencing our lives. ”

“ Upon this judgment of the common sense our inductions are all grounded, so that it may be called the inductive principle. Withdraw trust from it and experience becomes blind as a mole. We may feel what is present at the moment, but the distant and the future are wholly hid in darkness. ”

“ But its influence was greater in destruction of old falsities than in the construction of new ties and associations among men. Its formal and empty nature, due to conceiving reason as something complete in itself apart from subject matter, its hostile attitude toward historical institutions, its disregard of the influence of habit, instinct, and emotion, as operative factors in life, left it impotent in the suggestion of specific aims and methods. ”

“ And I thought any man who had tact enough for that would be my undoing and I should not wonder,” with a swift look from under her long lashes, “if it were true, but you will never tell a soul I told you, will you?” beseechingly. “It’s a secret—the undoing, you know.” ”

“ 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! ”

“ Economy, literature and art, philosophy, politics and all phases of social and individual life, show a certain fundamental trait, common to all—a deep dissatisfaction with the world as it exists at present, From each one of these multitudinous manifestations of human intelligence arises a bitter cry, the same in all cases, an appeal for a radical change. ”

“ Further, this diversity of mind, entering into, necessarily creates the numerous individual fibres which are the sources of the vigor and strength of the social frame. Is it not then evident, that the expansion of any one mental power to the neglect of all, or of some to the neglect of others, would take away more or less of this vigor and strength; would disfigure the social frame and destroy its beauty and harmony of proportion? ”

“ Then might I exemplify how an influence, beyond our control, lays its strong hand on every deed which we do, and weaves its consequences into an iron tissue of necessity. ”

“ If, in the last Place, we consider the Nature of an indifferent Intention, we shall find that it destroys the Merit of a good Action; abates, but never takes away, the Malignity of an evil Action; and leaves an indifferent Action in its natural State of Indifference. ”

“ Imagine to yourselves a being like Nature, boundlessly extravagant, boundlessly indifferent, without purpose or consideration, without pity or justice, at once fruitful and barren and uncertain: imagine to yourselves INDIFFERENCE as a power—how COULD you live in accordance with such indifference? ”

“ In this process which is called sublimation, the energy arising out of conflict is diverted from some channel which leads in an asocial or antisocial direction, and turned into one leading to an end connected with the higher ideals of society. ”

“ He recognized the truth, which all experience declares, that in these emotions is nothing great, nothing loveable, nothing powerful; that their energy is perpetually found incapable of withstanding the impetuosity of passion; and that all transcendant virtues, all that brings us to tremble or to kneel, all the enterprises and conflicts which dignify history, and have stamped any new feature on human life, have had their origin in the disinterested region of the mind ”

“ By all these influences, so fatal to enthusiasm of character, and forming, most of them, indeed, a part of the ordinary process by which hearts become chilled and hardened in the world, it was impossible but that some material change must have been effected in a disposition at once so susceptible and tenacious of impressions. ”

“ That strange instinct for consistency which makes people desire to see the outward man correspond, in terms of momentary and arbitrary credit, with the inner and hidden man of the heart, has in truth led to more biographical injustice than is fully realised. ”

“ The influence of whatever good instructions he may receive, is counteracted by a combination of opposite influences almost constantly acting on him. He is essentially and inevitably unapt to be powerfully acted on by what is invisible and future. ”

“ I make no attack upon any organization or body. I criticize the trend of certain influences, and I willingly admit, as all must do, even those who most dread their effects, that these influences have their origin in centres imbued with genuine altruism. ”

“ Such is the nature even of our most baneful impressions that instances do arise where good may come from so corrupt a source. The connection between material and immaterial, between mind and matter, so operates, that sometimes, and in proportion to the strength of the impression, a change is wrought by the mere control of the mind over the bodily functions. ”

“ She watches "the stealthy convergence of human fates," the intersection at various angles of the planes of character, the power that the lower nature has to thwart, stupefy, or corrupt the higher, which has become entangled with it in the mesh of destiny. ”

“ But all the other manifestations of human thought of the present time allow us also to discern the same traits as those in the physiognomy of modern literature. All around us we notice a general sense of uneasiness and a mental irritation, which assumes in one mind the form of grief or anger at the unbearable state of affairs in this world, and in another, produces a decided longing for a change in all the conditions of modern life. ”

“ The fractional entities of vitality are embraced in the oneness of the unitary Ego. Life," she added, "is the garnered condensation of objective impressions; and, as the objective is the remote father of the subjective, so must individuality, which is but focused subjectivity, suffer and fade when the sensation lenses, by which the rays of impression are condensed, become destroyed." ”

“ Or they may come from the countless minor and cumulative suggestions which life makes to us, and which few of us have the subtlety to analyze. If these suggestions of tradition or environment are met by resistance, either of the moral or intellectual order, whilst yet the deep instinct for full life remains unsatisfied, the result is an inner conflict of more or less severity; and as a rule, this is only resolved and harmony achieved through the crisis of conversion, breaking down resistances, liberating emotion and reconciling inner craving with outer stimulus. ”

“ He seems not to have known, or not to have considered, that words, being arbitrary, must owe their power to association, and have the influence, and that only, which custom has given them. ”

“ It is because we are not thus attuned to life, and surrendered to it, that our social confusion arises; the conflict of impulse within society simply mirrors the conflict of impulse within each individual mind.
We know that some of the greatest movements of history, veritable transformations of the group-mind, can be traced back to a tiny beginning in the faithful spiritual experience and response of some one man, his contact with the centre which started the ripples of creative love. ”

“ When we have discovered what kinds of impulse we desire, we must not rest content with preaching, or with trying to produce the outward manifestation without the inner spring; we must try rather to alter institutions in the way that will, of itself, modify the life of impulse in the desired direction. ”

“ Descending life, the decay of all organising power—that is to say, of all that power which separates, cleaves gulfs, and establishes rank above and below, formulated itself in modern sociology as the ideal. ”

“ But this fatal susceptibility is the cause of that strange facility which has often astonished the world, by the sudden transitions of sentiment which literary characters have frequently exhibited. They have eulogised men and events which they had reprobated, and reprobated what they had eulogised. The recent history of political revolutions has furnished some monstrous examples of this subservience to power. ”

“ But mere exclusion would never beget a reality, nor would a mere sensuous impression ever give birth to a perception, if there were not something from which it was excluded, if by an absolute act of the mind the negation were not referred to something positive, and if opposition did not issue out of non-position. ”

“ This found its way to the brain of man in preachment more dangerous than words. It heralded gloriously the era whose disconcerting, unsuspected changes are upon us, making us shiver with presage of unmeasured things. No longer shall the golden, fluent splendor, life, be expressed in stale formulas. ”

“ Every image that rises up in his mind points with mysterious silence, though with significant look and finger, to other images distinct or shadowy, and induces him to set up relations between ideas, where other people recognise no connection. ”

“ The field of influence was great and infinitely varied—once one had conquered a name. ”

“ Therefore, having considered the liberation of our stored-up energy by emotional excitements and by efforts, whether methodical or unmethodical, I must now say a word about ideas as our third great dynamogenic agent. Ideas contradict other ideas and keep us from believing them. An idea that thus negates a first idea may itself in turn be negated by a third idea, and the first idea may thus regain its natural influence over our belief and determine our behavior. ”

“ Essentials of sensation, line, color, have become revolutionists, forsworn allegiance to fact. They have started independent existence. Like lost ships on uncharted oceans, they are careening toward the unknown. ”