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John Bascom - Creator of Science of Mind - progenitor of New Thought

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John Bascom's

Science of Mind

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Introduction - Intellect - Mental Science's Divisions - Intellect's Divisions and Perceptions - The Understanding - The Reason - The Dynamics of the Intellect - Physical Feelings - Intellectual Feelings - Spiritual Feelings - Dynamics of Feelings - The Will - The Nervous System - Nervous System of Man - Executive Volition - Primary Volition, or Choice - Dynamics of the Will and the Mind - The Relations of the Systems Here Offered to Prevalent Forms of Philosophy - Index - Contents -


in the third department of mental phenomena, expresses an explicit termination of all vacillation, a close deliberation by an act of will in favor of this and in rejection of that.

The case thus being closed by a specific and peculiar act, there remains a longer or shorter series of efforts to be made in reaching the object proposed, in accomplishing the career marked out. There are no definite limits in analysis to these intermediate acts. Our division may extend to each muscular movement, or it may stop short with each specific undertaking. I propose to build a house; the number of distinct physical and intellectual efforts involved in the project are indefinitely great; and while they are all under the control of the will, we have no occasion to place a distinct volition back of each one of them. The will has the power, by a few explicit volitions, to direct the current of the vital powers in a single channel of expenditure. A walk once entered on, the movement becomes in a large measure unconscious, and the mind is left at liberty to pursue any line of action it prefers. The voluntary and the involuntary play of physical members differ not so much in the manner in which they are sustained, as in the way in which they are initiated, and in the fact that the one is momentarily open to modification, and arrest.

The distinction then made between a choice and a volition seems to be found in their position in reference to an end, rather than in their intrinsic character. The one is initiatory of a line of action; the other sustains and completes it. This one is primary, the other subsidiary. The one is determinative and governing, the other executive. The first gives character to an action, the second sustains and develops that character. The one is immediately free, the other mediately so, through its dependence- on the first. The division thus sinks into a classification of volitions, and removes neither choice nor volition from the phenomena of

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