Esoteric - Spiritual

The Fairy belief, we have said, is a composite thing. On the materials given by tradition, such as the memory, perhaps, of a pre-historic race, and by old religion, as in the thoughts about the pre-Christian Hades, poetry and fancy have been at work.

THE RICH, ACTIVELY FULFILLED LIFE of the French prophet, Michel de Nostradame, is the story of genius not only in its rarest but its most modern form. His ability foreshadowed a hope, now gaining a first hearing in this our day, that science may, in some not too remote tomorrow, discover principles of mental forces which will permit every man to realize within himself a reflection of the powers of Nostradamus.

Twenty-even ten-years ago the phenomena which Prof. Flournoy here describes in detail, and of which he offers a keen, skilful, psychological analysis, would have met with the sneers of popular science and the contempt of obscurantist orthodoxy; the book would have found few readers.

A simple and readable account in English of the life and writings of a remarkable Flemish Mystic of the fourteenth century, a contemporary of our own Walter Hilton. Though his memory and honour have never faded in his own native Belgium, and though France and Germany have vied with each other in spreading his teaching and singing his praises, the very name of Blessed John Ruysbroeck is practically unknown this side of the water.

"The word was God." That "word is Truth." Truth can never change, or it would contradict itself. Past, present, and future, must be governed by immutable laws. Experience is acquired by the careful study of history, and the present condition of all things.

The case for the "psychic" element in literature rests on a very old foundation; it reaches back to the ancient masters,-the men who wrote the Greek tragedies. Remorse will ever seem commonplace alongside the furies. Ever and always the shadow of the supernatural invites, pursues us.

It is not that the history of Spiritual Manifestations in this century and country has not again and again been written, nor that a library of the splendid literature of Spiritualism-narrative, philosophical, and religious-does not already exist, that I have deemed it a duty to give this history to the world.