Phantasms of the Living - Volume I.. Frank Podmore
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Название: Phantasms of the Living - Volume I.

Автор: Frank Podmore

Издательство: Ingram

Жанр: Эзотерика

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isbn: 9781528767743

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СКАЧАТЬ and hygiene. But the unconquerable spontaneity of the organic world is for ever setting previous generalisations at defiance; in great things and small, from the production of a new type of national physique to the production of a new variety of tulip, it is ever presenting fresh developments, whose necessity no one could divine, and of which no one could say aught until they were actually there. And so, though science follows closely after, and keeps up the game with spirit, its position in its Wonderland is always rather like that of Alice in hers, when the croquet-hoops consisted of soldiers who moved as often as they chose. The game is one on which it will never be safe to bet for very far ahead; and it is one which will certainly never end.

      And if this is true of life in its physical manifestations, it is certainly not less true of its mental manifestations. It is to the latter, indeed, that we naturally turn for the highest examples of mobility, and the most marked exhibitions of the unexpected. An Athenian of Solon’s time, speculating on “the coming race,” might well have predicted for his countrymen the physical prowess that won Marathon, but not the peculiar intellectual vitality that culminated in the theatre of Dionysus. At the present moment, it is safer to prophesy that the next generation in Germany will include a good many hundreds of thousands of short-sighted persons than that it will include a Beethoven. Nor will it surprise us to find the “sports” and uncertainties of vital development most conspicuous on the psychical side, if we remember the nature of their physical basis. For mental facts are indissolubly linked with the very class of material facts that science can least penetrate—with the most complex sort of changes occurring in the most subtly-woven sort of matter—the molecular activities of brain-tissue.