Historical Reprints Philosophical Beyond Human Personality

Beyond Human Personality

Beyond Human Personality
Catalog # SKU1237
Publisher TGS Publishing
Weight 1.00 lbs
Author Name F. W. H. Myers
 
$15.95
Quantity

Description

Beyond
Human Personality

by
Frederic William Henry Myers


Containing an account of the gradual development
of human personality into cosmic personality
through GERALDINE CUMMINS

"Unquestionably the truth or fallacy of the theory of the survival of the soul is by far the most tremendous question that can exercise the human mind. The more you think of it, the more all other questions seem to sink into utter insignificance, for only if survival be true, can the Universe be rationalized at all, because only in this way, and in this alone, can we confront the problem of evil. If survival be not true, then the only possible philosophy is blank pessimism, and the Ruler of the Universe cannot be acquitted of cruelty that would shock any normal man."

Excerpt from the Introduction:

I have come to the conclusion that there is no finished World of the Absolute, erase from your mind this conception of German and Indian thought. For God is imagination, is the illumination or blaze beyond reason. He maintains and preserves the past, and contains the conception or picture of the future. But he adds to Himself, that is an important point.

Now, the soul of man is a finite focus or centre for imagination, more especially when functioning on the higher levels though still associated with the material body. This soul manifests dimly a creative power which is akin to, and of the Great Cosmic Imagination. God is many in One, One in Many. The souls and spirits of all things living aim ultimately at becoming one with their Creator. Thus the Imagination of God is altered and enriched by the adding up of the time process. It attains a perfection on a higher level ultimately.

Schopenhauer, the advocate of the unconscious, seems to me to be in error. For God reflects, is purposive, and creates with an ecstasy beyond human comprehension.... I am very pleased by the simple and explicit manner in which you have developed the thesis of the ether in your book and in your discussions. I am aware that the scientists dislike this view of yours: but scientists are so often blinded by their own eyes. The term "ether" is a bad one. I wish we could find a more suggestive word. I agree with you concerning its properties. I would like to find a Greek word which expresses the idea of the English equivalent "life-bearer." Let us find a word that conveys that meaning.

Excerpt from the Chapter 1:

THE Greek ideal of soundness in mind and body, the Greek reverence for beauty and strength must come into their own again. I perceive the earth now as from a mountain top. I perceive the swarming multitudes, who give no real or considered reflection to the future of the coming generation. You may argue that conditions are perfect if compared with those prevalent in the Victorian era. It is true that there are degrees of darkness in every night. The world draws a little nearer to the dawn and there is a dim pallor in the east. Perhaps it is the portent of a splendid sunrise of rose colored clouds, of the coming of a great yellow orb, which, with its life-giving rays, will yet dazzle and delight mankind; or perhaps that ghostly pallor suggests the squalid depression of a fog-bound and imprisoned sun; or more awfully, suggests an angry day of tempest, with the sweep of grey clouds across the sky from west to east, with the sound of the wind raging, tearing and breaking over the hills and hollows, over the wide, tremendous spaces of earth.

No man is permitted to know in full the secret of the coming time. But we souls who dwell in the After-death, we, who live in kindled bodies, with quickened intensity and with fiery delight in the first heaven-world, Eidos, dimly see the trend of man's thought and therefore, presage his endeavor in the coming times.

It is in the thought and fancies of the children that the future is being imaged. Created before it be flung into the potter's furnace to be hardened into the mould of the age, it takes on the indestructible sculpture of history and again, an era called "the present" passes, to be recorded in God's time, in Eternity.

I ask the men and women of your generation who, even now, in their children, are carving and shaping the morrow, to bear in mind the old dream of the Greeks, to remember their ideal soundness of mind and of body, to recollect their devotion to beauty and to strength.

It is in no caviling, destructive spirit that I beg of the men and women of the day to consider the human being apart from machines, to consider life apart from gold. Within the restless jangle of those monstrous cogs and wheels which now turn ceaselessly and bear your so-called civilization upon them, there is little leisure or quiet for the calmness or philosophic meditation out of which knowledge is born; and what somber destiny may not await the children of the morrow if they, too, are caught in the grip of that creature without a soul, which is known in your age of steel as "the machine" that last and final embodiment of the god of Materialism.

Christ, the Son of the Father, descended to earth and took on flesh and, in so doing, He drew down to men, the beauty that is not of this world. In the twentieth century the Machine, the son of the Golden Calf, the son of all materialism, descended to earth and took on body and substance. In these latter days, his creed is practiced in every comer of the globe. Men worship passionately, feverishly at his shrine.

Into many and various sections these ant-like human beings are divided, and these sections are called "nations" and each nation is baptized with another name for the machine which is briefly Insulated State.

In a highly civilized country the state to-day runs with the automatic smoothness of any engine that drives the looms in Lancashire: that gives power to the mills to the vast industrial enterprises which supply the needs of the swarming lives of earth. The state must necessarily control this multitude with something of the soullessness of the machine, else its population may lessen in numbers, may become the victim of fever and want.

But, because the state has now the character of a very delicate mechanism, there is grave danger of the mechanism running away with the man. The nation may plunge down the hill into war, or it may, in a slower manner, produce and propagate misery by an increase of its millions of human beings, and above all, by its increase of the ineffectives, the weaklings, the degenerates and the insane. Always, the blind purpose of this god of Matter the State Machine seems to be quantity and not quality, always its aim is the automatic multiplication of numbers and thereby the multiplication of distress.

With the exception of the thoughtful and sincere minority, men are not capable, as yet, of understanding or grasping the implications contained in the words of Christ. But they may dimly comprehend the Greek dream and they will be acting wisely and well if they turn back the pages of history, if they study the old Greek world and, eliminating the primitive elements of that Hellenic adventure, take to heart for their children's sakes the lesson of soundness in mind and body, of reverence for beauty and for strength.


210+pages - 5 x 8 inches SoftCover

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