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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 -


and pure, it comes short. A conscientious man becomes a martyr to his convictions of duty. He stands against the community, and confronts its authority, its alleged line of duty, with his own independent convictions, his own sense of what is right. All the explanation of these most startling and pregnant facts in the world's moral history, facts that above all others catch the rational eye, and disclose the new force that is flaming up in them, is that of the "Self-originating or Idiosyncratic Conscience." It is an instance of "the transfer of the sentiment of prohibition from a recognized case, to one not recognized." That is to say, with no notion of obligation but the enforced one of education, the individual may, nevertheless, transfer it so strictly to his own independent, unsustained speculation as to oppose these serenely and unhesitatingly to the utmost stretch of the authority of the community over him. This is a transfer indeed, a transfer that is a transformation, that discloses a sentiment in kind and quality totally unlike that with which it commenced. It went into the cocoon a worm, it comes out a butterfly. This is no explanation; it is a confession of defeat. Better would it have been to have left the phenomena unexplained.

(4) Further, we do not day by day impose duties on others in the manner that would be indicated by the above theory. Scarcely anything could be more adverse to the methods of those who are constantly using moral force, who are addressing and stimulating the conscience, than an appeal to the common sentiments, that is popular sentiments, of those approached. Indeed, to such persons it would seem unworthy, sometimes even absolutely immoral to urge action on others primarily on the ground of the customs and censures of general society. Nor could these censures often be made to subserve the purposes of morality. The apostle of moral truth expects more frequently than

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