Hypnotism and hypnotic suggestion : A scientific treatise on the uses and possibilities of hypnotism, suggestion and allied phenomena / By thirty authors. Edited by E. Virgil Neal ... and Charles S. Clark.

Date:
[1900], [©1900]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Hypnotism and hypnotic suggestion : A scientific treatise on the uses and possibilities of hypnotism, suggestion and allied phenomena / By thirty authors. Edited by E. Virgil Neal ... and Charles S. Clark. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    perior beauty for some rival kin^. Hate and intolerance have their parts v^ith wrecks and ruins. Their blighting breaths wither the fairest iiowers of hope and make the heart of humanity a desert, where love would make it blossom as the gardens of the gods. Language fails to present a picture of the world as it ought to be. The mind, chained by dull customs to the things that are, fails to grasp the meaning of the things that might be. Life ties and binds together, and about some common center starts the spiral revolutions of an upward progression; but death breaks and separates and crashes down into silent and motionless inac- tion. Death has its mission; it is as necessary to evolution as growth itself; but it must make for life; it must become an abject slave. Woe to the man whose dead hopes or dead faiths still wear crowns. Sing no dirges to a dead heart, but let your own living ieart sing and know that the heart of God is never still. There is no dead nature—no dead world, unless your own. vitality is ebbing away. In most lives the centripetal forces abound over the centrifugal. Thought and feeling revolve selfishly about the self-center, instead of generously tending off on lines of sacrific- ing service; and when men are long indifferent toward us, we ^rov/ indifferent to their indifference. Life can be compared to a spiral along which the individual walks, sometimes slowly and painfully as he makes his way up the ascending curve that leads from gloom and adversity to the sunlight; then a brief journey and the joys of life, and the descent begins; and so up and •down, but ever onward, until the last curve is reached and the world journey ends. Our future in that unknown land is deter- mined by the upward or downward trend of our last steps. We need not employ deep metaphysical arguments to show that this life is a state of trial for us—it is an obvious fact. The important part is our relation to the future life; what we must do to attain our destiny. It is the bearings that the premises of rigorists have upon this point that makes them important and worthy of atten- tion. He who is false to present duty, breaks a thread in the loom and will find the flaw when he may have forgotten the cause. All men and women must meet themselves and become well ac- quainted. It is a curious fact in history that no nations degen- erate so low as those which have occupied the most exalted posi- tions.