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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 -


avails not if he finds them all occupied in their own ways, and is unable to divert them from their labors, and convert them to his purposes. In other words, an act of will must go deeper and extend farther than itself and lay hold of a whole circle of modifiable powers in the execution of its plans. Unless the thoughts and feelings are spontaneous, unless they are potential, and hold themselves at the beck of the will, in whole or in part, the will remains impotent, having no service because it has no servants. Spontaneity, then, must belong to our intellectual constitution or freedom cannot belong to our voluntary life. Origination at single detached points avails nothing. The will can not be operative if out of harmony with our other powers. It must be able to act by anticipation, to accumulate and modify motives; it must be able to rally to its choices the forces of the mind, and carry protractedly forward its processes; it must be profoundly in sympathy with the entire constitution, and pervade its powers as a life-giving law. Dr. Carpenter, unwilling to abandon liberty, though it is a notion quite out of keeping with his general system, regards volition "as exerted in augmenting the nervous tension of the part of the cortical substance of the cerebrum which is concerned in the formation of the idea of the thing to be done. It consists in an intensification of the hyperaemic state of the ideational centre." (Mental Physiology, p. 425). This voluntary increase of the blood in the brain is open philosophically to all and more than all the difficulties of complete, proportionate freedom, and is most impotent in accomplishing its purposes. If one could at will increase or diminish the steam in the cylinder, and so modify the motive power in any branch of manufacture, this fact would not avail to alter the processes in progress. It would quicken or retard the movement, but not re-direct it. This very narrow volition would be so enveloped in

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