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The famous legend as told by Homer in a rare tri-partite translation.
The world needs knowledge, but still more imperatively it needs the right use of the knowledge that is at its disposal. For this reason I have been mainly concerned in these pages with indicating what I consider to be the right mental attitude with which to approach certain fundamental questions.
In presenting this volume to the "intelligence of the world," the author is fully aware of the incredulity with which it may meet in many literary minds. Nevertheless, the truths which it contains will remain unmarred by the salient attacks of "critics," when they have passed away and have ceased to be remembered.
From the terrible conditions of the present I have turned back to the past, for a little joy and a great deliverance. In the present one lives no longer from day to day, but from hour to hour, and even a fleeting memory of the joys that are no more refreshes the soul-wearied, and fainting with a pallid anxiety that wraith-like envelops the whole being in a thrall of sadness.
These lectures have been so maimed and mutilated by orthodox malice; have been made to appear so halt, crutched and decrepit by those who mistake the pleasures of calumny for the duties of religion, that in simple justice to myself I concluded to publish them.
I have, from time to time, witnessed many manifestations which I believe to have been superphysical, both from the peculiarity of their properties, and from the effects their presence invariably produced on me-an effect I cannot associate with anything physical.
WHAT is truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer. Certainly there be, that delight in giddiness, and count it a bondage to fix a belief; affecting free-will in thinking, as well as in acting. and though the sects of philosophers of that kind be gone, yet there remain certain discoursing wits, which are of the same veins, though there be not so much blood in them, as was in those of the ancients.
Day by day it becomes more evident that not one of the many existing theories is adequate to the explanation of the known phenomena: but, in spite of this obvious fact, attempts are still constantly being made, even by most eminent men, to rule the results of experimental science into line with this or that accepted theory.
Study the most primitive and simple religion which is actually known, to make an analysis of it, and to attempt an explanation of it. A religious system may be said to be the most primitive which we can observe when it fulfils the two following conditions: in the first place, when it is found in a society whose organization is surpassed by no others in simplicity;1 and secondly, when it is possible to explain it without making use of any element borrowed from a previous religion.
The travels of Herodotos in Egypt are followed for the first time in the light of recent discoveries, and the history of the intercourse between the Egyptians and the Jews is brought down to the age of the Roman Empire.
The main object of this book is to present a phalanx of facts upon the subject of the defenseless condition of this country, and to show what must be done, and done quickly, in order to avert the most dire calamity that can fall upon a people-that of merciless invasion by a foreign foe, with the horrors of which no pestilence can be compared. (Could this book be the birth of the Indusrial Military Complex?)
I am a hero worshiper; an insatiable devourer of biographies; and I say that no man in all the splendid list ever equaled Edmund Stonewall. You smile because you have never heard his name, for, until now, his biography has not been written. And this is not truly a biography; it is only the story of the crowning event in Stonewall's career.
We are not solely material, but partly physical and partly superphysical, I maintain that consciousness is never wholly lost; that even in swoons and dreams, when all sensations would seem to be swallowed up in the blackness of darkness, there is SOME consciousness left-the consciousness of existence, of impression.
Most of us want to do what we are not doing. In the majority of human hearts, deep down, is an intangible tormenting wish to go somewhere, to see some land, to do something which is not in the programme drawn up for us by the inexorable fate of birth and circumstance. Usually the longing is crushed out by the juggernaut wheels of life's ponderous Car of Necessity, which drives us all forward towards the Unknown in a set groove from which the most desperate efforts never extricate us.
To the ignorant a stumbling-stone, to the Philistines a laughing-stock, but to the Initiate a sweet remembrance of many a happy hour passed in informal chat with the Master.
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