The Drama of Love and Death; a Study of Human Evolution and Transfiguration

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1912 edition. Excerpt: ...childhood and of old age; and all in the course of half-an-hour or so.1 The images thus formed in the deep trance of the young man are so vivid, so powerful, so dramatic, that they take possession of the organism and compel it to become the means of their manifestation. In mediumistic trance the same thing happens. There may be suggestion from outside, or there may not, but in the depth of the medium's mind images are formed which speak and act through the entranced person, making use in doing so of the marvellous stores of memory and knowledge which the inner mind has at command, and sorely puzzling the spectators at times, as to whether the performance is merely histrionic or whether by chance it indicates a bona fide communication from the dead.2 'See Lombroso, Fenomeni ipnotici e tpiritici, Turin, 1909, pp. 28-31. 1 the latter open for.ter. I leave the question of the possibility of tt the present See Note at end of this chapte This energetic dramatic quality of the image-forming faculty is tremendously important. It has not been enough insisted upon; and it has been greatly misunderstood and misrepresented. It is, as I say, a root-property of creation. It is seen everywhere in the healthy activity of the human mind, in its delight in romance and imagination, in the play of children, the stage, literature, art, scientific invention--the sheer joy of creation, going on everywhere and always. Lay the conscious and controlling and selective power of the upper mind at rest, in the trance-condition, and you have in the deeps of the subliminal self this primal creative power exposed. Offer to it the lightest suggestion, and there springs forth from that abyss a figure corresponding, or a dozen figures, or a whole procession I The mere...