1954 · CLOSE READING
Magick Without Tears
Magick Without Tears (1954), PDF p. 518
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PROGRESS
485
great harm will result, as the weak and vicious will weed
themselves out.
The pure gold will repay us ten thousandfold. You ask
examples? With us, the Elizabethan and the Victorian periods
stand out. What is most wanted is opportunity and reward.
Under Victoria there was some-taste the late Samuel Smiles
Esquire,
D.D. (wasn't
he?)-but
not enough, and
Industrialism,
the mother
and nurse of Socialism, was
destroying the soul of the people.
In my not very maternal remarks on Mother-love, was
included the substance of the one wise saying of my pet
American lunatic, "You can't get past their biology." This is
so true, and so disheartening, that it arouses me to combat.
Must we for ever be bound to the inconvenient habit of cows
and cabbages? I pick up the glove.
Isn't it Aldous Huxley who says somewhere that some
species or other can never develop higher powers because its
brain is shut in by its carapace? I thought this too, long ago;
and I went into interminable conferences with myoId friend,
Professor Buckmaster; I wanted to extend brain surgery to
produce the phenomena of Yoga. Also, I wondered what
would happen if we wedged apart the sections of the cranium
at, or shortly after, birth, so as to prevent them closing and
giving the brain a chance to grow.
I suspect, by the way, that something of the sort is done in
China and Burma; but the object is merely to produce
megalocephalic idiots as a valuable addition to the financial
resources of the family.
I thought that modern physiology, with its great recent
advances in knowledge of the specialized functions of the
brain , might quite possibly succeed in producing genius.
You would not surprise me if you told me that something
of the sort is being tried in Russia, with its Communism
modelled so closely on that of Ivan the Terrible at this
moment, war or no war! Qui vivra verra.
Anyhow, all that I really want you to get into your head
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