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Modern Transcendental Idealism, Emersonianism, For Instance, Also Seems To Let God Evaporate Into Abstract Ideality. Not A Deity In Concreto, Not A Superhuman Person, But The Immanent Divinity In Things, The Essentially Spiritual Structure Of The Universe, Is The Object Of The Transcendentalist Cult. In That Address Of The Graduating Class At Divinity College In 1838 Which Made Emerson Famous, The Frank Expression Of This Worship Of Mere Abstract Laws Was What Made The Scandal Of The Performance.

-William James

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Modern Transcendental Idealism, Emersonianism,

William James

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Modern Transcendental Idealism, Emersonianism, For Instance, Also Seems To Let God Evaporate Into Abstract Ideality. Not A Deity In Concreto, Not A Superhuman Person, But The Immanent Divinity In Things, The Essentially Spiritual Structure Of The Universe, Is The Object Of The Transcendentalist Cult. In That Address Of The Graduating Class At Divinity College In 1838 Which Made Emerson Famous, The Frank Expression Of This Worship Of Mere Abstract Laws Was What Made The Scandal Of The Performance.

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As The Brain-changes Are Continuous, So Do All These Consciousnesses Melt Into Each Other Like Dissolving Views. Properly They Are But One Protracted Consciousness, One Unbroken Stream.

Serious Development Of The Personality Begins At The Closet Door.

The University Most Worthy Of Rational Admiration Is That One In Which Your Lonely Thinker Can Feel Himself Lonely, Most Positively Furthered, And Most Richly Fed

I Am Done With Great Things And Big Things, Great Institutions And Big Success, And I Am For Those Tiny, Invisible Molecular Moral Forces That Work From Individual To Individual, Creeping Through The Crannies Of The World Like So Many Rootlets, Or Like The Capillary Oozing Of Water, Yet Which If You Give Them Time, Will Rend The Hardest Monuments Of Man's Pride.

It Makes A Tremendous Emotional And Practical Difference To One Whether One Accepts The Universe In The Drab Discolored Way Of Stoic Resignation To Necessity, Or With The Passionate Happiness Of Christian Saints.

No Reception Without Reaction, No Impression Without Correlative Expression, -this Is The Great Maxim Which The Teacher Ought Never To Forget.

Compared With What We Ought To Be, We Are Only Half Awake. Our Fires Are Damped, Our Drafts Are Checked. We Are Making Use Of Only A Small Part Of Our Possible Mental And Physical Resources.

Keep The Faculty Of Effort Alive In You By A Little Gratuitous Exercise Every Day.

I Originally Studied Medicine In Order To Be A Physiologist, But I Drifted Into Psychology And Philosophy From A Sort Of Fatality. I Never Had Any Philosophic Instruction, The First Lecture On Psychology I Ever Heard Being The First I Ever Gave.

That Which Is Most Personal, Is Most Interesting.

Most Interesting

My Thinking Is First And Last And Always For The Sake Of My Doing, And I Can Only Do One Thing At A Time.

We Are Spinning Our Own Fates, Good Or Evil, Never To Be Undone.

Seek Out That Particular Mental Attribute Which Makes You Feel Most Deeply And Vitally Alive.

True Ideas Lead Us Into Useful Verbal And Conceptual Quarters As Well As Directly Up To Useful Sensible Termini. They Lead To Consistency, Stability And Flowing Human Intercourse.

The Most Ancient Parts Of Truth . . . Also Once Were Plastic. They Also Were Called True For Human Reasons. They Also Mediated Between Still Earlier Truths And What In Those Days Were Novel Observations. Purely Objective Truth, Truth In Whose Establishment The Function Of Giving Human Satisfaction In Marrying Previous Parts Of Experience With Newer Parts Played No Role Whatsoever, Is Nowhere To Be Found. The Reasons Why We Call Things True Is The Reason Why They Are True, For To Be True Means Only To Perform This Marriage-function.

Our Minds Thus Grow In Spots; And Like Grease-spots, The Spots Spread. But We Let Them Spread As Little As Possible: We Keep Unaltered As Much Of Our Old Knowledge, As Many Of Our Old Prejudices And Beliefs, As We Can. We Patch And Tinker More Than We Renew. The Novelty Soaks In; It Stains The Ancient Mass; But It Is Also Tinged By What Absorbs It.

It Is Our Attitude At The Beginning Of A Difficult Task Which, More Than Anything Else, Will Affect Its Successful Outcome.

Out Of Time We Cut 'days' And 'nights', 'summers' And 'winters.' We Say What, Each Part Of The Sensible Continuum Is, And All These Abstract Whats Are Concepts. The Intelletual Life Of Man Consists Almost Wholly In His Substitution Of A Conceptual Order For The Persceptual Order In Which His Experience Originally Comes.

So Long As Antimilitarists Propose No Substitute For War's Disciplinary Function, No Moral Equivalent Of War, Analogous, As One Might Say, To The Mechanical Equivalent Of Heat, So Long They Fail To Realize The Full Inwardness Of The Situation.

Most Unhappiness Is Caused Because People Listen To Themselves... Instead Of Talking To Themselves.

One Hearty Laugh Together Will Bring Enemies Into A Closer Communion Of Heart Than Hours Spent On Both Sides In Inward Wrestling With The Mental Demon Of Uncharitable Feeling.

The Total Mental Efficiency Of A Man Is The Resultant Of The Working Together Of All His Faculties. He Is Too Complex A Being For Any One Of Them To Have The Casting Vote. If Any One Of Them Do Have The Casting Vote, It Is More Likely To Be The Strength Of His Desire And Passion, The Strength Of The Interest He Takes In What Is Proposed. Concentration, Memory, Reasoning Power, Inventiveness, Excellence Of The Senses, All Are Subsidiary To This.

Our Theories Are Wedged And Controlled As Nothing Else Is. Yet Sometimes Alternative Theoretic Formulas Are Equally Compatible With All The Truths We Know, And Then We Choose Between Them For Subjective Reasons. We Choose The Kind Of Theory To Which We Are Already Partial: We Follow 'elegenace' Or 'economy'

We Ought, All Of Us, To Realize Each Other In This Intense, Pathetic, And Important Way. If You Say That This Is Absurd, And That We Cannot Be In Love With Everyone At Once, I Merely Point Out To You That, As A Matter Of Fact, Certain Persons Do Exist With An Enormous Capacity For Friendship And For Taking Delight In Other People's Lives; And That Such Persons Know More Of Truth Than If Their Hearts Were Not So Big.

We Divert Our Attention From Disease And Death As Much As We Can; The Slaughterhouses Are Huddled Out Of Sight And Never Mentioned, So That The World We Recognize Officially In Literature And In Society Is A Poetic Fiction Far Handsomer, Cleaner And Better Than The World That Really Is.

Disease And Death

A Remarkable Parallel, Which I Think Has Never Been Noticed, Obtains Between The Facts Of Social Evolution On The One Hand, And Of Zological Evolution As Expounded By Mr. Darwin On The Other.

Science As Such Assuredly Has No Authority, For She Can Only Say What Is, Not What Is Not.

The Belief In Free-will Is Not In The Least Incompatible With The Belief In Providence, Provided You Do Not Restrict The Providence To Fulminating Nothing But Fatal Decrees.

Deepest Principle Of Human Nature Is To Be Appreciated.

Choose A Self And Stand By It.

I Know That You, Ladies And Gentlemen, Have A Philosophy, Each And All Of You, And That The Most Interesting And Important Thing About You Is The Way In Which It Determines The Perspective In Your Several Worlds.

We [may] Answer The Question: "why Is Snow White?" By Saying, "for The Same Reason That Soap-suds Or Whipped Eggs Are White"-in Other Words, Instead Of Giving The Reason For A Fact, We Give Another Example Of The Same Fact. This Offering A Similar Instance, Instead Of A Reason, Has Often Been Criticised As One Of The Forms Of Logical Depravity In Men. But Manifestly It Is Not A Perverse Act Of Thought, But Only An Incomplete One. Furnishing Parallel Cases Is The Necessary First Step Towards Abstracting The Reason Imbedded In Them All.

The Art Of Being Wise Is The Art Of Knowing What To Overlook.

Humanism . . . Is Not A Single Hypothesis Or Theorem, And It Dwells On No New Facts. It Is Rather A Slow Shifting In The Philosophic Perspective, Making Things Appear As From A New Centre Of Interest Or Point Of Sight.

Effort Is A Measure Of A Man.

It Would Probably Astound Each Of Them Beyond Measure To Be Let Into His Neighbor's Mind And To Find How Different The Scenery There Was From That In His Own.

Feed The Growing Human Being, Feed Him With The Sort Of Experience For Which From Year To Year He Shows A Natural Craving, And He Will Develop In Adult Life A Sounder Sort Of Mental Tissue, Even Though He May Seem To Be 'wasting' A Great Deal Of His Growing Time, In The Eyes Of Those For Whom The Only Channels Of Learning Are Books And Verbally Communicated Information.

Organization And Method Mean Much, But Contagious Human Characters Mean More In A University.

Time Itself Comes In Drops.

Evil Is A Disease; And Worry Over Disease Is Itself An Additional Form Of Disease, Which Only Adds To The Original Complaint.

The True'to Put It Very Briefly, Is Only The Expedient In The Way Of Our Thinking, Just As 'the Right' Is Only The Expedient In The Way Of Our Behaving.

When A Thing Is New, People Say: ‘it Is Not True.’ Later, When Its Truth Becomes Obvious, They Say: ‘it Is Not Important.’ Finally, When Its Importance Cannot Be Denied, They Say: ‘anyway, It Is Not New.

Science Can Tell Us What Exists; But To Compare The Worths, Both Of What Exists And Of What Does Not Exist, We Must Consult Not Science, But What Pascal Calls Our Heart.

I Take It That No Man Is Educated Who Has Never Dallied With The Thought Of Suicide.

We Are All Potentially Such Sick Men. The Sanest And Best Of Us Are Of One Clay With Lunatics And Prison-inmates. And Whenever We Feel This, Such A Sense Of The Vanity Of Our Voluntary Career Comes Over Us, That All Our Morality Appears But As A Plaster Hiding A Sore It Can Never Cure, And All Our Well-doing As The Hollowest Substitute For That Well-being That Our Lives Ought To Be Grounded In, But Alas! Are Not.

What Every Genuine Philosopher (every Genuine Man, In Fact) Craves Most Is Praise Although The Philosophers Generally Call It Recognition!

Rewards And Recognition

The Emotions Aren't Always Immediately Subject To Reason, But They Are Always Immediately Subject To Action.

The Most Any One Can Do Is To Confess As Candidly As He Can The Grounds For The Faith That Is In Him, And Leave His Example To Work On Others As It May.

In The Deepest Heart Of All Of Us There Is A Corner In Which The Ultimate Mystery Of Things Works Sadly.

Individuality Is Founded In Feeling

When Happiness Is Actually In Possession, The Thought Of Evil Can No More Acquire The Feeling Of Reality Than The Thought Of Good Can Gain Reality When Melancholy Rules. To The Man Actively Happy, From Whatever Cause, Evil Simply Cannot Then And There Be Believed In.

True Ideas Are Those That We Can Assimilate, Validate, Corroborate, And Verify. False Ideas Are Those That We Cannot

There Is No More Miserable Human Being Than One In Whom Nothing Is Habitual But Indecision, And For Whom The Lighting Of Every Cigar, The Drinking Of Every Cup, The Time Of Rising And Going To Bed Every Day, And The Beginning Of Every Bit Of Work, Are Subjects Of Express Volitional Deliberation.

You Perceive Now, My Friends, What Your General Or Abstract Duty Is As Teachers. Although You Have To Generate In Your Pupils A Large Stock Of Ideas, Any One Of Which May Be Inhibitory, Yet You Must Also See To It That No Habitual Hesitancy Or Paralysis Of The Will Ensues, And That The Pupil Still Retains His Power Of Vigorous Action.

Most Of Us Can Learn To Live In Perfect Comfort On Higher Levels Of Power. Everyone Knows That On Any Given Day There Are Energies Slumbering In Him Which The Incitements Of That Day Do Not Call Forth. Compared With What We Ought To Be, We Are Only Half Awake. It Is Evident That Our Organism Has Stored-up Reserves Of Energy That Are Ordinarily Not Called Upon - Deeper And Deeper Strata Of Explosible Material, Ready For Use By Anyone Who Probes So Deep. The Human Individual Usually Lives Far Within His Limits.

Since You Make Evil Or Good By Your Own Thoughts, It Is Your Ruling Of Your Thoughts Which Proves To Be Your Principal Concern.

Democracy Is Still Upon Its Trial. The Civic Genius Of Our People Is Its Only Bulwark.

Fear Of Life In One Form Or Another Is The Great Thing To Exorcise.

The First Thing To Learn In Intercourse With Others Is Non-interference With Their Own Particular Ways Of Being Happy, Provided Those Ways Do Not Assume To Interfere By Violence With Ours.

What Holds Attention Determines Action.

A Winner's Attitude: It May Be Difficult, But It's Possible. A Loser's Attitude: It May Be Possible, But It's Too Difficult.

Events Are Influenced By Our Very Great Desires.

If You Give Appreciation To People, You Win Their Goodwill. But More Important Than That, Practicing This Philosophy Has Made A Different Person Of Me.

The Difference Between The First And Second-best Things In Art Absolutely Seems To Escape Verbal Definition -- It Is A Matter Of A Hair, A Shade, An Inward Quiver Of Some Kind -- Yet What Miles Away In The Point Of Preciousness!

There Is A Law In Psychology That If You Form A Picture In Your Mind Of What You Would Like To Be, And You Keep And Hold That Picture There Long Enough, You Will Soon Become Exactly As You Have Been Thinking.

I Am Tired Of The Position Of The Dried-up Critic And Doubter. The Believer Is The True Full Man. (from A Biography Of James By Robert D. Richardson)

You Can't Out-perform Your Self-image.

Our Beliefs Are Really Rules For Action.

Belief Creates The Actual Fact.

If You Believe That Feeling Bad Or Worrying Long Enough Will Change A Past Or Future Event, Then You Are Residing On Another Planet With A Different Reality System.

...these Healers...my Intellect Has Been Unable To Assimilate Their Theories....but Their Facts Are Patent And Startling; And Anything That Interferes With The Multiplication Of Such Facts, And With Our Freest Opportunity Of Observing And Studying Them, Will, I Believe, Be A Public Calamity.

Essential Truth, The Truth Of The Intellectualists, The Truth With No One Thinking It, Is Like The Coat That Fits Tho No One Has Ever Tried It On, Like The Music That No Ear Has Listened To. It Is Less Real, Not More Real, Than The Verified Article; And To Attribute A Superior Degree Of Glory To It Seems Little More Than A Piece Of Perverse Abstraction-worship.

The Total Possible Consciousness May Be Split Into Parts Which Co-exist But Mutually Ignore Each Other.

All Our Scientific And Philosophic Ideals Are Altars To Unknown Gods.

What The Whole Community Comes To Believe In Grasps The Individual As In A Vise.

Far From Being Antecedent Principles That Animate The Process, Law, Language, Truth Are But Abstract Names For Its Results.

There Is But One Cause Of Human Failure. And That Is Man's Lack Of Faith In His True Self.

It Is Wrong Always, Everywhere, And For Everyone, To Believe Anything Upon Insufficient Evidence.

Nature In Her Unfathomable Designs Had Mixed Us Of Clay And Flame, Of Brain And Mind, That The Two Things Hang Indubitably Together And Determine Each Other's Being But How Or Why, No Mortal May Ever Know.

The Greatest Discovery Of The 19th Century Was Not In The Realm Of The Physical Sciences, But The Power Of The Subconscious Mind Touched By Faith. Any Individual Can Tap Into An Eternal Reservoir Of Power That Will Enable Them To Overcome Any Problem That May Arise. All Weaknesses Can Be Overcome, Bodily Healing, Financial Independence, Spiritual Awakening, And Prosperity Beyond Your Wildest Dreams. This Is The Superstructure Of Happiness.

Religious Awe Is The Same Organic Thrill Which We Feel In A Forest At Twilight, Or In A Mountain Gorge.

Ideas Are So Much Flat Psychological Surface Unless Some Mirrored Matter Gives Them Cognitive Lustre. This Is Why As A Pragmatisti Have So Carefully Posited 'reality' Ab Initio, And Why Throughout My Whole Discussion, I Remain An Epistemologist Realist.

The War For Our Union, With All The Constitutional Issues Which It Settled, And All The Military Lessons Which It Gathered In, Has Throughout Its Dilatory Length But One Meaning In The Eyes Of History. It Freed The Country From The Social Plague Which Until Then Had Made Political Development Impossible In The United States. More And More, As The Years Pass, Does The Meaning Stand Forth As The Sole Meaning.

If The Grace Of God Miraculously Operates, It Probably Operates Through The Subliminal Door.

Man Lives In Only One Small Room Of The Enormous House Of His Consciousness.

The Subjectivist In Morals, When His Moral Feelings Are At War With The Facts About Him, Is Always Free To Seek Harmony By Toningdown The Sensitiveness Of The Feelings.

Human Beings Are Born Into This Little Span Of Life Of Which The Best Thing Is Its Friendships And Intimacies … And Yet They Leave Their Friendships And Intimacies With No Cultivation, To Grow As They Will By The Roadside, Expecting Them To "keep" By Force Of Mere Inertia.

There Is No More Miserable Human Being Than One In Whom Nothing Is Habitual But Indecision.

There Can Be No Final Truth In Ethics Any More Than In Physics, Until The Last Man Has Had His Experience And Said His Say.

'pure Experience' Is The Name I Gave To The Immediate Flux Of Life Which Furnishes The Material To Our Later Reflection With Its Conceptual Categories.

The Ideas Gained By Men Before They Are Twenty-five Are Practically The Only Ideas They Shall Have In Their Lives.

Both Thought And Feeling Are Determinants Of Conduct, And The Same Conduct May Be Determined Either By Feeling Or By Thought.

A Good Hypothesis In Science Must Have Other Properties Than Those Of The Phenomenon It Is Immediately Invoked To Explain, Otherwise It Is Not Prolific Enough.

To Improve The Golden Moment Of Opportunity, And Catch The Good That Is Within Our Reach, Is The Great Art Of Life.

Our Faith Is Faith In Someone Else's Faith, And In The Greatest Matters This Is Most The Case.

The Squalid Cash Interpretation Put On The Word Success Is Our National Disease.

Most Men's Friendships Are Too Inarticulate.

In Its Broadest Term, Religion Says That There Is An Unseen Order, And That Our Supreme Good Lies In Rightful Relations To It.

We Can Change Our Circumstances By A Mere Change Of Our Attitude.

Man Can Change His Life Simply By Changing His Attitude.

All The Daily Routine Of Life, Our Dressing And Undressing, The Coming And Going From Our Work Or Carrying Through Of Its Various Operations, Is Utterly Without Mental Reference To Pleasure And Pain, Except Under Rarely Realized Conditions.

The Transition From Tenseness, Self-responsibility, And Worry, To Equanimity, Receptivity, And Peace, Is The Most Wonderful Of All Those Shiftings Of Inner Equilibrium, Those Changes Of Personal Centre Of Energy, Which I Have Analyzed So Often; And The Chief Wonder Of It Is That It So Often Comes About, Not By Doing, But By Simply Relaxing And Throwing The Burden Down.

Religion, Therefore, As I Now Ask You Arbitrarily To Take It, Shall Mean For Us The Feelings, Acts, And Experiences Of Individual Men In Their Solitude, So Far As They Apprehend Themselves To Stand In Relation To Whatever They May Consider The Divine. Since The Relation May Be Either Moral, Physical, Or Ritual, It Is Evident That Out Of Religion In The Sense In Which We Take It, Theologies, Philosophies, And Ecclesiastical Organizations May Secondarily Grow.

There Is An Organic Affinity Between Joyousness And Tenderness, And Their Companionship In The Saintly Life Need In No Way Occasion Surprise.

The Good Or Bad Is Not In The Circumstance, But Only In The Mind...that Encounters It.

The Deepest Human Need Is The Need To Be Appreciated.

The Mind Of Your Own Enemy, The Pupil, Is Working Away From You, As Keenly And Eagerly As Is The Mind Of The Commander On The Other Side From The Scientific General. Just What The Respective Enemies Want And Think, And What They Know Or Do Not Know, Are As Hard Things For The Teachers As For The General To Find Out.

We Don't Laugh Because We're Happy - We're Happy Because We Laugh.

Religion Is A Monumental Chapter In The History Of Human Egotism.

True Is The Name For Whatever Idea Starts The Verification Process, Useful Is The Name For Its Completed Function In Experience

[t]here Is Very Little Difference Between One Person And Another, But What Little Difference Ther Eis, Is Very Important.

Life Is One Long Struggle Between Conclusions Based On Abstract Ways Of Conceiving Cases, And Opposite Conclusions Prompted By Our Instinctive Perception Of Them.

First... A New Theory Is Attacked As Absurd; Then It Is Admitted To Be True, But Obvious And Insignificant; Finally It Is Seen To Be So Important That Its Adversaries Claim That They Themselves Discovered It.

Everything Which Is Demanded Is By That Fact A Good.

The Teachers Of This Country, One May Say, Have Its Future In Their Hands.

The Community Stagnates Without The Impulse Of The Individual. The Impulse Dies Away Without The Sympathy Of The Community.

Beyond The Very Extreme Of Fatigue And Distress, We May Find Amounts Of Ease And Power We Never Dreamed Ourselves To Own; Sources Of Strength Never Taxed At All Because We Never Push Through The Obstruction

We Forget That Every Good That Is Worth Possessing Must Be Paid For In Strokes Of Daily Effort.

Effort And Hard Work

The Perfect Stillness Of The Night Was Thrilled By A More Solemn Silence. The Darkness Held A Presence That Was All The More Felt Because It Was Not Seen. I Could Not Any More Have Doubted That He Was There Than That I Was. Indeed, I Felt Myself To Be, If Possible, The Less Real Of The Two.

Footnotes -- Little Dogs Yapping At The Heels Of The Text

Philosophy, Beginning In Wonder, As Plato And Aristotle Said, Is Able To Fancy Everything Different From What It Is. It Sees The Familiar As If It Were Strange, And The Strange As If It Were Familiar. It Can Take Things Up And Lay Them Down Again. It Rouses Us From Our Native Dogmatic Slumber And Breaks Up Our Caked Prejudices.

Never Suffer An Exception To Occur Till The New Habit Is Securely Rooted In Your Life. Each Lapse Is Like The Letting Fall Of A Ball Of String Which One Is Carefully Winding Up; A Single Slip Undoes More Than A Great Many Turns Will Wind Again.

Habit Is Thus The Enormous Fly-wheel Of Society, Its Most Precious Conservative Agent. It Alone Is What Keeps Us All Within The Bounds Of Ordinance.

Don't Preach Too Much To Your Pupils Or Abound In Good Talk In The Abstract. Lie In Wait Rather For The Practical Opportunities, Be Prompt To Seize Those As They Pass, And Thus At One Operation Get Your Pupils Both To Think, To Feel, And To Do.

Marvelous As May Be The Power Of My Dog To Understand My Moods, Deathless As His Affection And Fidelity, His Mental State Is As Unsolved A Mystery To Me As It Was To My Remotest Ancestor.

Social Evolution Is A Resultant Of The Interaction Of Two Wholly Distinct Factors: The Individual ... Bearing All The Power Of Initiative And Origination In His Hands; And, Second, The Social Environment With Its Power Of Adopting Or Rejecting Both Him And His Gifts. Both Factors Are Essential To Change. The Community Stagnates Without The Impulse Of The Individual. The Impulse Dies Away Without The Sympathy Of The Community.

As Long As There Are Postmen, Life Will Have Zest.

We Are Proud Of A Human Nature That Could Be So Passionately Extreme, But We Shrink From Advising Others To Follow The Example.

The Drunken Consciousness Is One Bit Of The Mystic Consciousness, And Our Total Opinion Of It Must Find Its Place In Our Opinion Of That Larger Whole.

Intellectualism' Is The Belief That Our Mind Comes Upon A World Complete In Itself, And Has The Duty Of Ascertaining Its Contents; But Has No Power Of Re-determining Its Character, For That Is Already Given.

The Gist Of The Matter Is This: Every Impression That Comes In From Without, Be It A Sentence Which We Hear, An Object Of Vision, Or An Effluvium Which Assails Our Nose, No Sooner Enters Our Consciousness Than It Is Drafted Off In Some Determinate Direction Or Other, Making Connection With The Other Materials Already There, And Finally Producing What We Call Our Reaction. The Particular Connections It Strikes Into Are Determined By Our Past Experiences And The 'associations' Of The Present Sort Of Impression With Them.

Of Course, This Has Its Good Side As Well As Its Bad One. As We Become Permanent Drunkards By So May Separate Drinks, So We Become Saints In The Moral, And Authorities And Experts In The Practical And Scientific Spheres, By So Many Separate Acts And Hours Of Work. Let No Youth Have Any Anxiety About The Upshot Of His Education, Whatever The Line Of It May Be. If He Keep Faithfully Busy Each Hour Of The Working Day, He May Safely Leave The Final Result To Itself.

If Things Are Ever To Move Upward, Some One Must Take The First Step, And Assume The Risk Of It. No One Who Is Not Willing To Try Charity, To Try Non-resistance As The Saint Is Always Willing, Can Tell Whether These Methods Will Or Will Not Succeed.

The Sway Of Alcohol Over Mankind Is Unquestionably Due To Its Power To Stimulate The Mystical Faculties Of Human Nature, Usually Crushed To Earth By The Cold Facts And Dry Criticisms Of The Sober Hour.

The One Who Thinks Over His Experiences Most, And Weaves Them Into Systematic Relations With Each Other, Will Be The One With The Best Memory.

A Man Does Not Cry Because He Is Sad, He Is Sad Because He Cries

Lay Plans As If We Were To Be Immortal.

Equality Is Attainable As Long As You Are Part Of The Majority.

You Can Alter Your Life By Altering The State Of Your Mind.

Our Beliefs And Our Attention Are The Same Fact.

Tension Is A Habit. Relaxing Is A Habit. Bad Habits Can Be Broken, Good Habits Formed.

When A Superior Intellect And A Psychopathic Temperament Coalesce In The Same Individual, We Have The Best Possible Condition For The Kind Of Effective Genius That Gets Into The Biographical Dictionaries.

The More Rational Statement Is That We Feel Sorry Because We Strike, Afraid Because We Tremble, And Not That We Cry, Strike, Or Tremble Because We Are Sorry, Angry, Or Fearful As The Case May Be.

Every Way Of Classifying A Thing Is But A Way Of Handling It For Some Particular Purpose.

In The Last Analysis, Then, We Believe That We All Know And Think About And Talk About The Same World Because We Believe Our Percepts Are Possessed By Us In Common

So You See That The Process Of Education, Taken In A Large Way, May Be Described As Nothing But The Process Of Acquiring Ideas Or Conceptions, The Best Educated Mind Being The Mind Which Has The Largest Stock Of Them, Ready To Meet The Largest Possible Variety Of The Emergencies Of Life. The Lack Of Education Means Only The Failure To Have Acquired Them, And The Consequent Liability To Be 'floored' And 'rattled' In The Vicissitudes Of Experience.

The Greatest Enemy Of Any One Of Our Truths May Be The Rest Of Our Truths.

One Hears Of The Mechanical Equivalent Of Heat. What We Now Need To Discover In The Social Realm Is The Moral Equivalent Of War: Something Heroic That Will Speak To Men As Universally As War Does, And Yet Will Be As Compatible With Their Spiritual Selves As War Has Proved Itself To Be Incompatible.

The Power To Move The World Is In The Subconcious Mind

The Sovereign Cure For Worry Is Prayer.

Man, Biologically Considered ... Is Simply The Most Formidable Of All Beasts Of Prey, And, Indeed, The Only One That Preys Systematically On Its Own Kind.

From The Vedas We Learn A Practical Art Of Surgery, Medicine, Music, House Building Under Which Mechanized Art Is Included. They Are Encyclopedia Of Every Aspect Of Life, Culture, Religion, Science, Ethics, Law, Cosmology And Meteorology.

Culture Religion

We Are All Ready To Be Savage In Some Cause. The Difference Between A Good Man And A Bad One Is The Choice Of The Cause.

The Instant Field Of The Present Is At All Times What I Call The 'pure' Experience. It Is Only Virtually Or Potentially Either Object Or Subject As Yet.

So With The Man Who Has Daily Inured Himself To Habits Of Concentrated Attention, Energetic Volition, And Self-denial In Unnecessary Things. He Will Stand Like A Tower When Everything Rocks Around Him, And When His Softer Fellow-mortals Are Winnowed Like Chaff In The Blast.

Faith Is Synonymous With Working Hypothesis.

Circumstance Does Not Make Me, It Reveals Me.

The 'i Think' Which Kant Said Must Be Able To Accompany All My Objects, Is The 'i Breathe' Which Actually Does Accompany Them.

The War Against War Is Going To Be No Holiday Excursion Or Camping Party.

The Mind Is Made Up By What It Feeds Upon.

We Must Make Automatic And Habitual, As Early As Possible, As Many Useful Actions As We Can, And As Carefully Guard Against The Growing Into Ways That Are Likely To Be Disadvantageous.

The Perfection Of Rottenness.

We Need Only In Cold Blood To Act As If The Thing In Question Were Real And It Will Infallibly End By Growing Into Such A Connection With Our Life That It Will Become Real.

With Mere Good Intentions Hell Is Proverbially Paved.

Good Intentions

In Modern Eyes, Precious Though Wars May Be They Must Not Be Waged Solely For The Sake Of The Ideal Harvest. Only When Forced Upon One, Is A War Now Thought Permissible.

A Genius Is The Man In Whom You Are Least Likely To Find The Power Of Attending To Anything Insipid Or Distasteful In Itself. He Breaks His Engagements, Leaves His Letters Unanswered, Neglects His Family Duties Incorrigibly, Because He Is Powerless To Turn His Attention Down And Back From Those More Interesting Trains Of Imagery With Which His Genius Constantly Occupies His Mind.

The Simplest Rudiment Of Mystical Experience Would Seem To Be That Deepened Sense Of The Significance Of A Maxim Or Formula Which Occasionally Sweeps Over One.

Mystical Experiences

As We Take, In Fact, A General View Of The Wonderful Stream Of Our Consciousness, What Strikes Us First Is This Different Pace Of Its Parts. Like A Bird 's Life, It Seems To Be Made Of An Alternation Of Flights And Perchings.

So Far War Has Been The Only Force That Can Discipline A Whole Community, And Until An Equivalent Discipline Is Organized, I Believe That War Must Have Its Way.

To Know One Thing Thoroughly Would Be To Know The Universe.

If An Unusual Necessity Forces Us Onward, A Surprising Thing Occurs. The Fatigue Gets Worse Up To A Certain Point, When, Gradually Or Suddenly, It Passes Away And We Are Fresher Than Before!

The Only Function That One Experience Can Perform Is To Lead Into Another Experience; And The Only Fulfillment We Can Speak Of Isthe Reaching Of A Certain Experienced End. When One Experience Leads To (or Can Lead To) The Same End As Another, They Agree In Function.

Woe To Him Whose Beliefs Play Fast And Loose With The Order Which Realities Follow In His Experience; They Will Lead Him Nowhere Or Else Make False Connections

Theory Must Mediate Between All Previous Truths And Certain New Experiences

New Experiences

There Is Nothing So Absurd That It Cannot Be Believed As Truth If Repeated Often Enough.

Acceptance Of What Has Happened Is The First Step To Overcoming The Consequences Of Any Misfortune.

The Truth Remains That, After Adolescence Has Begun, "words, Words, Words," Must Constitute A Large Part, And An Always Larger Part As Life Advances, Of What The Human Being Has To Learn.

Or If The Hypothesis Were Offered Us Of A World In Which Messrs. Fourier's And Bellamy's And Morris's Utopias Should All Be Outdone, And Millions Kept Permanently Happy On The One Simple Condition That A Certain Lost Soul On The Far-off Edge Of Things Should Lead A Life Of Lonely Torment, What Except A Specifical And Independent Sort Of Emotion Can It Be Which Would Make Us Immediately Feel, Even Though An Impulse Arose Within Us To Clutch At The Happiness So Offered, How Hideous A Thing Would Be Its Enjoyment When Deliberately Accepted As The Fruit Of Such A Bargain?

Men Habitually Use Only A Small Part Of The Power Which They Actually Possess.

Every Sort Of Energy And Endurance, Of Courage And Capacity For Handling Life's Evils, Is Set Free In Those Who Have Religious Faith.

So It Is With Children Who Learn To Read Fluently And Well: They Begin To Take Flight Into Whole New Worlds As Effortlessly As Young Birds Take To The Sky.

If The Topic Be Highly Abstract, Show Its Nature By Concrete Examples. If It Be Unfamiliar, Trace Some Point Of Analogy In It With The Known. If It Be Inhuman, Make It Figure As Part Of A Story. If It Be Difficult, Couple Its Acquisition With Some Prospect Of Personal Gain. Above All Things, Make Sure That It Shall Run Through Certain Inner Changes, Since No Unvarying Object Can Possibly Hold The Mental Field For Long.

...as I Apprehend The Buddhist Doctrine Of Karma, I Agree In Principle With That.

When You Have To Make A Choice And Don't Make It, That Is In Itself A Choice.

The Most Violent Revolutions In An Individuals Beliefs Leave Most Of His Old Order Standing. Time And Space, Cause And Effect, Nature And History, And Ones Own Biography Remain Untouched. New Truth Is Always A Go-between, A Smoother-over Of Transitions. It Marries Old Opinion To New Fact So As Ever To Show A Minimum Of Jolt, A Maximum Of Continuity.

The Strenuous Life Tastes Better

Every Time A Resolve Or A Fine Glow Of Feeling Evaporates Without Bearing Practical Fruit Is Worse Than A Chance Lost; It Works To Hinder Future Resolutions And Emotions From Taking The Normal Path Of Discharge. There Is No More Contemptible Type Of Human Character Than That Of The Nerveless Sentimentalist And Dreamer, Who Spends His Life In A Weltering Sea Of Sensibility And Emotion, But Who Never Does A Manly Concrete Deed.

We Must Make Automatic And Habitual, As Early As Possible, As Many Useful Actions As We Can...in The Acquisition Of A New Habit, We Must Take Car To Launch Ourselves With As Strong And Decided Initiative As Possible. Never Suffer An Exception To Occur Till The New Habit Is Securely Rooted In Your Life.

Plasticity, Then, In The Wide Sense Of The Word, Means The Possession Of A Structure Weak Enough To Yield To An Influence, But Strong Enough Not To Yield All At Once. Each Relatively Stable Phase Of Equilibrium In Such A Structure Is Marked By What We May Call A New Set Of Habits.

Any Object Not Interesting In Itself May Become Interesting Through Becoming Associated With An Object In Which An Interest Already Exists.

The Essence Of Genius Is To Know What To Overlook.

What Excites And Interests The Looker-on At Life, What The Romances And The Statues Celebrate, And The Grim Civic Monuments Remind Us Of, Is The Everlasting Battle Of The Powers Of Light With Those Of Darkness; With Heroism Reduced To Its Bare Chance, Yet Ever And Anon Snatching Victory From The Jaws Of Death.

The Mind, In Short, Works On The Data It Receives Very Much As The Sculptor Works On His Block Of Stone.

In The Matter Of Belief, We Are All Extreme Conservatives.

I Don't Sing Because I'm Happy; I'm Happy Because I Sing.

The Highest Flights Of Charity, Devotion, Trust, Patience, Bravery To Which The Wings Of Human Nature Have Spread Themselves, Have Been Flown For Religious Ideals.

The Most Natively Interesting Object To A Man Is His Own Personal Self And Its Fortunes. We Accordingly See That The Moment A Thing Becomes Connected With The Fortunes Of The Self, It Forthwith Becomes An Interesting Thing.

The Science Of Logic Never Made A Man Reason Rightly, And The Science Of Ethics Never Made A Man Behave Rightly. The Most Such Sciences Can Do Is To Help Us To Catch Ourselves Up And Check Ourselves, If We Start To Reason Or To Behave Wrongly; And To Criticise Ourselves More Articulately After We Have Made Mistakes.

If You Give Appreciation To People, You Win Their Goodwill.

There Is But One Unconditional Commandment ... To Bring About The Very Largest Total Universe Of Good Which We Can See.

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