FOLLOW A WORD THROUGH THE COLLECTION
Search the corpus.
Phrase search ignores case and repeated whitespace. All-words search finds whole words anywhere on the same page. OCR errors can affect results.
1,638 matching pages
Page 80 of 821929 · PDF PAGE 247
… particular person or not. The Woman in White and The Moonstone illustrate the situation with singular clearness. Despite the astounding power of Wilkie Collins to draw characters, he cannot make the heroine interesting. Laura Fairlie is little better than an imbecile even when not actually suffering from dementia. The artist's subconscious mind play this sort of thing on him as a joke. He gets so disgusted with himself that he avenges himself on the dummy which offends him. In these tow novels, the heroes are represented as exceptionally fine …
1929 · PDF PAGE 434
…heaven. I failed to divine the essential hopelessness of helping her. I idealized her; I robed her in the royal vestures of romance. The power and passion of her playing inspired me. Her beauty, physical and moral, bewitched me. I failed to realize to what extent these qualities depend upon circumstances; but it was clear by the beginning of 1912 that she could never get much higher than leading the Ladies' Band in The Waltz Dream as she had been doing. The best hope was to find something equally within her powers which would yet give her the o…
1907 · PDF PAGE 134
proper adjustment of their braces than they ever did before. So we find as faith has ost power, prurience has gained sway. In the days of Alexander V1 a child would have been disembowelled for spelling Homousios with a second i and 2. Pope would not have been considered as worthy of the Vic erenc of Christ unless he had held secret intercourse with every single member 5? his family. But to-day with such pietistic parasites as the Protestant Pioneer and the Freethinker, with such Christian inverts as In-Gram and F66-Té, such puritanical broken-bo…
1929 · PDF PAGE 386
…of every kind, from Cabbalistic and mathematical proofs, and those depending on future events and similar facts, undeniably beyond human power to predict or to produce, that it is unique. The thirty Aethyrs being, however, only second in importance, though very far away, to that Book, the Lords of Vision were at pains to supply internal evidence, more than amply sufficient that the revelations therein contained may be regarded as reliable. No doubt the proof appears stronger to me than to anyone else, because I alone know exactly what happened;…
1929 · PDF PAGE 411
…kes even the holiest honeymoon a medley; delight is dulled by distraction. The secret of life is concentration, and I have attained this power despite every original disadvantage, not so much by virtue of my persistence in the practices which tend to improve one's technique, but by my determination to arrange my affairs on the large scale so as to minimize the possibilities of distraction. The resolve to read no newspapers, to see as few people as possible, to read or write during meals, to live so that the petty problems of every day are as fe…
1929 · PDF PAGE 80
…ng a model. But the device deceived nobody. The evidence of his pictures was too glaring. The effort, moreover, completely exhausted his power of resistance; and he received the blow with Christian resignation. It saddens me more hat I can say to think of that young life which opened with such brilliant promise, gradually sinking into the slough of respectability. Of course it is not as if he had been able to paint; but to me the calamity is almost as distressing as if that possibility had ever existed. For he completely hypnotized me into thin…
1929 · PDF PAGE 580
… was hardly more than a boy, without resources, friends or influence. Against him were arrayed the entrenched forces of authority. Their power was arbitrary and extended for all practical purposes to life and death! Stripped of his scholarship and expelled from the university at the most critical moment of his career, he would have found himself almost as desperately situated as a tramp with a bad record thrown out of work on to the Embankment. Yet so conscious of their guilt were his oppressors that they feared to face the consequences of any …
1929 · PDF PAGE 144
…lendours and luxuries of Asia, as I had been about Jacobites. But already I had learnt to use my eyes; prejudices had somehow lost their power to persuade. My experience of the Order probably counted for a good deal in this. At the same time, I did not swing from one extreme to the other. "Blessed are they that expect nothing; for they shall not be disappointed!" I was in no danger of judging the principles of Buddhism by the practices of Buddhists. I worked out the logical consequences of any philosophy without reference to the criticisms of h…
1929 · PDF PAGE 520
…brainless bulk of brawn, to be manipulated as mechanically as a chessman, exercising his inherent energies without the slightest wish or power to think or act for himself. (This stage corresponds to that which we are rapidly approaching in industry.) Now at least we have reached a further stage. The complexity of a battle and its mere extent in space have made it impossible for {820} a single man to handle his troops as was done by Marlborough and Napoleon, and therefore it has become once more necessary for the subordinate officer, and even, t…
1904 · PDF PAGE 104
…t impossible to formulate mentally. As to an infinite intelligence, all philo- sophers of any standing are agreed that all- love and all-power are incom patible. The existence of the universe is a standing proof of this. The Deist needs the Optimist to keep him company; over their firesides all goes well, but it is a sad shipwreck they suffer on emerging into the cold world. This is why those who seek to buttress up religion are so anxious to prove that the universe has no real existence, or only a temporary and relatively unimportant one; the …
1904 · PDF PAGE 117
…y . The con- scious phenomenon, and the bliss, is of so stupendous and well-defined a nature that I cannot imagine any preconceived idea power- ful enough to diminish it appreciably. But for the sake of the former class I hold my tongue.1 I trust it is now perfectly clear, if m y statements are accepted—and I can only 1 On the advisibility of so doing I am open to conviction. T he scientific m ind, I m ight ar gue, will not readily fall into that error ; and for the others, they will be useless as a research phalanx, and may as well see blue pi…
1929 · PDF PAGE 534
…oyal largesse baffled their brains. They felt sure that it concealed some super-subtle scheme for swindling them or getting them into my power. They thought they knew that the more noble an action appeared, the deeper the deceit and the dirtier the design beneath it. I adhered to simple straightforward sense. I told the truth without a thought of what might happen in consequence. It was inconceivable to them that I, knowing so much, should yet be innocent. They knew me poor. It was strange indeed that I never tried to make money, or even accept…
1929 · PDF PAGE 397
…ct for me. They explained that he had come round and argued that he was going to be a director of the proposed company and therefore had power to conduct the business. The youth indubitably possessed the virtue of doing nothing by halves. He forged my name to endorse cheques payable to me, cashed them and enjoyed the proceeds. I gasped. I liked the man and had no quarrel with him, but I could not exactly pretend not to notice incidents of this kind. I tackled him about it. He played the innocent and really he was fundamentally such a half-witte…
1929 · PDF PAGE 120
…ssess such a reputation? Eliphas Lévi's explanations left me cold. I began to suspect that it must be a corruption of some true "word of power". I investigated it by means of the Cabbala. I restored its true spelling. Analysis showed it to be indeed the essential formula of the Great Work. It showed who to unite the Macrocosm with the Microcosm. I, therefore, adopted this word and its numerical value, 418, as the quintessentialized expression of the proper way to conduct all major Magical Operations. This discovery was only one of many. Before …
1904 · PDF PAGE 116
…ahal with fairy lamps and chintz. It is sim ple. The m ind is com pelled to fix its attention on a single thought; while the controlling power is exercised and a profound watchfulness kept up lest the thought should for a moment stray .1 The latter portion is, to m y m ind, the essential one. The work is comparable to that of an electrician who should sit for hours with h is finger on a delicately adjusted resistance-box and his eye on the spot of light of a galvanometer, charged with the duty of keeping the spot still, at least that it should …
1929 · PDF PAGE 430
…ts failure to explain this case, and he has assured me personally that he is completely baffled and inclined to believe that some occult power is at work. Bert Reece is an Americanized German or Polish Jew from Posen. He was, I suppose, at this time about sixty years old. He commanded enormous fees for consultations. Many of the biggest business men in the States acted habitually on his advice. My own interest was limited to the curiosity aroused by Carrington's statement. I went to see him at the Savoy Hotel in London. His personality is delig…
1929 · PDF PAGE 364
…n the strictest sense; that is, he could condense ideas into sensible forms. He could not do it at all by himself, because he lacked the power to collect at one point all the available material of the required kind, as may be done by concentrated will, and thereby to create such a state of strain in the atmosphere that the evoked forces must relieve it, if they possibly can, by a change of state. Just so carbon dioxide, if forced into a closed cylinder {587} below the critical temperature, relieves the intolerable pressure by liquefying. Here t…
1929 · PDF PAGE 450
…eyes and a long straight thin mouth, a scarlet scar which seemed to ache with the anguish of hunger for some satisfaction beyond earth's power to supply. We came together with irresistible magnetism. We could not converse in human language. I had forgotten nearly all my Russian; and her German was confined to a few broken cries. But we had not need of speech. The love between us was ineffably intense. It still inflames my inmost spirit. She had passed beyond the region where pleasure had meaning for her. She could only feel through pain, and my…
1929 · PDF PAGE 352
…e good to leave her and refuse to return until guarantees were given that she had stopped drinking. There did really seem some hope; the power of love might work the miracle, and certainly my love for Rose was stronger than ever, although cut away completely from its physical support. I have always been peculiarly sensitive about trifles in my rapports with women; the most trivial thing can put me off completely. (Alexander Harvey has a superb story, "The Mustache", in which this psychology is admirably set forth.) I could have borne her death …
1929 · PDF PAGE 371
…ly remarkable about its character. It is this very fact that makes us ask how it is that so ordinary a circumstance should have been the power to break down the resolute resistance of a {597} 1. Such, at least, is a tenable hypothesis. I have no direct evidence that he does not do so! Magician whose will had been developed to the utmost by every type of training from evocation to exploration? The answer can only be that, exactly as Coriolanus, insensible to all other appeals, was touched by the tears of his mother, so I, whose determination had…