Human Nature in Politics - Third Edition by Graham Wallas
page 71 of 260 (27%)
page 71 of 260 (27%)
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He sees his brood about thy knee;
The next, like fire he meets the foe, And strikes him dead for thine and thee.' 'Thine and thee' at the end seem to me to express precisely the change from the automatic images of 'voice' and 'face' to the reflective mood in which the full meaning of that for which he fights is realised. But it is the 'face' that 'gives the battle to his hands.' Here again, as we saw when comparing impulses themselves, it is the evolutionarily earlier more automatic, fact that has the greater, and the later intellectual fact which has the less impulsive power. Even as one sits in one's chair one can feel that that is so. Still more clearly can one feel it if one thinks of the phenomena of religion. The only religion of any importance which has ever been consciously constructed by a psychologist is the Positivism of Auguste Comte. In order to produce a sufficiently powerful stimulus to ensure moral action among the distractions and temptations of daily life, he required each of his disciples to make for himself a visual image of Humanity. The disciple was to practice mental contemplation for a definite period each morning of the remembered figure of some known and loved woman--his mother, or wife, or sister. He was to keep the figure always in the same attitude and dress, so that it should always present itself automatically as a definite mental image in immediate association with the word Humanité.[12] With that would be automatically associated the original impulse of affection for the person imaged. As soon as possible after that would come the meaning of the word, and the fuller but less cogent emotional associations connected with that meaning. This invention was partly borrowed from certain forms of mental discipline in |
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