This action, under the basic endowment – intelligence – is called Rational Volition.
There is thus, Intelligence; the Power to choose; the power to act and the adaptation of acts or restraints to ends, or to desired objects or results.
Experience teaches the individual, thus endowed, that he is responsible for all he thinks, feels, acts and does; and this, under his endowment of Intelligence, is what we call Conscience.
We are not building up a theory, but simply analyzing psychological facts, demonstrated as true in the experience of every intelligent individual. Just as the chemist analyzes a compound he finds in his laboratory.
Our Modulus is the Perfect Man. Our Theorem is the method of use that, by experience and observation everywhere, has been demonstrated as Constructive, enabling the Individual to build toward, and to realize the Modulus.
The power to discriminate, choose and act, when normally exercised, implies judgment and understanding.
Hence, we have perception, rational choice, intelligent action and desired results, for which we recognize our personal responsibility. Hence arise our ability and necessity to review our actions, motives, aims and their results, and to pass judgment upon them in the Light of Conscience (Con-Science, to know the Self) to pass judgment upon ourselves as to motives, aims, results, and consequences.
The Brain is a center of consciousness with avenues of perception and impulse and departments that by aggregation, separation or association, enable the Individual Intelligence to determine the relation in time, or duration, force and orderly relation of perceptions, desires, motives, actions (or thoughts and feelings) as to sequence or results.
This whole conscious realm is the Mind. It is the inner chamber of the Soul. It is in no sense an entity. The actor, the real entity, is the Individual Intelligence.
To say, therefore, that “Man is all mind,” or that the mind does this, or that, is simply nonsense. It is like saying that the little room in which I am now writing, with its books and pictures, with my thoughts, feelings, emotions, and magnetism, is I! Perhaps it is like me, or full of me, but I am something else and something more.
Let us get rid of this “confusion of tongues”; this “babel of Psychology”; “New Thought” (as old as man); “Metaphysics”; “Christian Science” et hoc genus omne, and come down to common sense and the facts of nature. The aim and the results along these lines are often good and helpful; then why clothe them in the garb of absurdities?
Recognize the facts, and express them intelligently, and they may do ten times more good, for then we could understand them. They are, one and all, a weak dilution of the old Hindoo Yoga, thrashed over there for thousands of years; straining after results, while ignorant of, or ignoring basic principles.
Aside from the “Eight Systems of Philosophy” now recognized in India, there are hundreds of varieties and classes of Yogis.
“To acquire powers” is one thing; self-mastery and self-knowledge are quite another. Thus the one is often distorted and always transient; the other constructive, regenerative, and enduring.
To illustrate by contrast what Constructive Psychology, or the building of character, is not, we may now take some of the forms of diseased action known to all time, occurring in individuals and in epidemics, and which to-day fill our Insane Asylums with “Incurables.”
The point of first importance in all these cases, is the lack of self-control. Weakness, aberration or disease of the Will. The Individual Intelligence fails to exercise its divine prerogative and be Master in and of its own house.
In the place of this control, sensations, feelings, emotions, desires, appetites, passions, and ambitions run riot. The Servants of the Master war among themselves, quarrel with each other, bind the Master hand and foot, wreck the furniture, and at last destroy the house. The Master has become the victim and at last the slave of his own servants. His Will is in abeyance; his perceptions distorted; his feelings and emotions aggravated; his “Reason Dethroned”; his judgment impaired; he has an “Unbalanced Mind.”
What is here needed but Christos in the Temple, “turning over the tables of the money-changers and the seats of them that sold doves,” and restoring the High-Priest in the Holy Temple – the Human Soul, viz.: the intelligent Will of Man, determined to govern his own house, and responsible for results?
In place of Rational Volition, clear, just and true perceptions, sound judgment and clear understanding, we have “Illusions,” “Hallucinations” and “Delusions.” In other words, the Individual is Insane!
It all goes deeper than the Mind; the Soul, the Individual Intelligence is dethroned in his own Kingdom; Body, Mind, and Soul are out of joint.
Not only does this condition exist without being recognized; not only just here lies the whole secret and field of Education in child, woman and man, but so ignorant are thousands as to these patent facts and basic principles, that they covet and strive after this confusion, this devolution, in the vain search for knowledge, light, and truth.
These are the office, the function and the result to the subject (or victim) of Mediumship and Hypnotism. They yield the Will, the mastery of their own house, to another.
The servants may be tractable for a while, but an alien is seated upon the throne, and the Master is no longer King in his own realm.
Others may indeed learn something from his undoing, from the crimes committed upon him, just as we learn from criminals how we ought not to live.
Whether ignorantly, voluntarily, by persuasion, or by force of a stronger will, the medium and the hypnotic subject are victims either of ignorance or of design, to their own undoing.
These psychical experiences have been found in all ages and among every people of whom we have any valid history, from the red Indians of the North to the Voodoos of Africa, and from the Hill Tribes of India to the earliest Scandinavian Tribes and the islands of the sea.
As civilizations advanced, the more intelligent and unscrupulous individuals, ambitious of knowledge or power, regardless of the rights or well-being of others, and discovering these powers, exercised them for their own aggrandizement. This has been known through the ages as Black Magic, and is laughed at to-day by so-called “Scientists” as “nothing but the fears, credulity, and superstitions of the ignorant multitude.” This was the core of Egyptian Paganism, and is the very genius of Clericalism to-day – the domination of the Individual Will, through superstition and fear.
Owing to seismic and cataclysmic shocks, volcanic eruptions, tidal waves, and great epidemics of disease, whole peoples have been dominated by fear or frenzied by superstitious dread, so that whole villages and cities became literally “mad-houses,” and were often depopulated.
Read the story of “Peter, the Hermit,” and “The Crusades,” the “Black Death,” the “Great Plague” that swept over Europe in the Thirteenth century; or that of the “Flagellants,” and the “Dancing Mania,” where whole villages became “Dancing Dervishes,” samples of which may occasionally be found to-day in the cities of America, the “Yogis” that are “Buddhas” or “Christs” in New York, and the Dowies that were “Elijahs” in Chicago, the Genius of Point Loma, Obispo, Santa Rosa, “Oahspe,” “Solar-Biology,” and again, et hoc genus omne! Verily! “there is nothing new under the sun.”
Contrast these individuals with an individual of sound mind, good judgment, and a well-ordered life, and see how and where and why the wreck inevitably follows.
The pressure outside changes continually, and these things spread and grow like all contagions. Nature at times seems wrathful and destructive, and there are, no doubt, deep-seated conditions and changes in the magnetism of the earth and air, not yet comprehended by modern science.
In stamping out contagious and epidemic disease, simple cleanliness has been like a revelation from the gods, and modern surgery has only stopped short of the miraculous.
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