Читать книгу The Dore Lectures on Mental Sciencel - Thomas Troward - Страница 4

The addresses contained in this volume were delivered by me at

the Dore Gallery, Bond Street, London, on the Sundays of the

first three months of the present year, and are now published at

the kind request of many of my hearers, hence their title of "The

Dore Lectures." A number of separate discourses on a variety of

subjects necessarily labours under the disadvantage of want of

continuity, and also under that of a liability to the frequent

repetition of similar ideas and expressions, and the reader will,

I trust, pardon these defects as inherent in the circumstances of

the work. At the same time it will be found that, although not

specially so designed, there is a certain progressive development

of thought through the dozen lectures which compose this volume,

the reason for which is that they all aim at expressing the same

fundamental idea, namely that, though the laws of the universe

can never be broken, they can be made to work under special

conditions which will produce results that could not be produced

under the conditions spontaneously provided by nature. This is a

simple scientific principle and it shows us the place which is

occupied by the personal factor, that, namely, of an intelligence

which sees beyond the present limited manifestation of the Law

into its real essence, and which thus constitutes the

instru-mentality by which the infinite possibilities of the Law

can be evoked into forms of power, usefulness, and beauty.

The more perfect, therefore, the working of the personal factor,

the greater will be the results developed from the Universal Law;

and hence our lines of study should be two-fold--on the one hand

the theoretical study of the action of Universal Law, and on the

other the practical fitting of ourselves to make use of it; and

if the present volume should assist any reader in this two-fold

quest, it will have answered its purpose.

The different subjects have necessarily been treated very

briefly, and the addresses can only be considered as suggestions

for lines of thought which the reader will be able to work out

for himself, and he must therefore not expect that careful

elabora-tion of detail which I would gladly have bestowed had I

been writing on one of these subjects exclusively. This little

book must be taken only for what it is, the record of somewhat

fragmentary talks with a very indulgent audience, to whom I

gratefully dedicate the volume.

JUNE 5, 1909.

T.T.