"EVIL" - читать интересную книгу автора (McIntyre Vonda N)

(Illustration: A banker may have a perfect grasp of a given situation, yet l
ack the quality of decision, or the assets, necessary to take advantage of it.)
(6) "Every man and every woman is a star." That is to say, every human bein
g is intrinsically an independent individual with his own proper character and
proper motion.
(7) Every man and every woman has a course, depending partly on the self, and
partly on the environment which is natural and necessary for each. Anyone who
is forced from his own course, either through not understanding himself, or thr
ough external opposition, comes into conflict with the order of the Universe, a
nd suffers accordingly. {XIV}
(Illustration: A man may think it his duty to act in a certain way, through
having made a fancy picture of himself, instead of investigating his actual nat
ure. For example, a woman may make herself miserable for life by thinking that
she prefers love to social consideration, or "vice versa". One woman may stay
with an unsympathetic husband when she would really be happy in an attic with
a lover, while another may fool herself into a romantic elopement when her only
true pleasures are those of presiding at fashionable functions. Again, a boy'
s instinct may tell him to go to sea, while his parents insists on his becoming
a doctor. In such a case, he will be both unsuccessful and unhappy in medicin
e.)
(8) A Man whose conscious will is at odds with his True Will is wasting his
strength. He cannot hope to influence his environment efficiently.
(Illustration: When Civil War rages in a nation, it is in no condition to un
dertake the invasion of other countries. A man with cancer employs his nourish
ment alike to his own use and to that of the enemy which is part of himself. H
e soon fails to resist the pressure of his environment. In practical life, a m
an who is doing what his conscience tells him to be wrong will do it very clums
ily. At first!)
(9) A man who is doing this True Will has the inertia of the Universe to ass
ist him.
(Illustration: The first principle of success in evolution is that the indiv
idual should be true to his own nature, and at the same time adapt himself to h
is environment.)
(10) Nature is a continuous phenomenon, though we do not know in all cases h
ow things are connected.
(Illustration: Human consciousness depends on the properties of protoplasm,
the existence of which depends on innumerable physical conditions peculiar to t
his planet; and this planet is determined by the mechanical balance of the whol
e universe of matter. We may then say that our consciousness is causally conne
cted with the remotest galaxies; yet we do not know even how it arises from ---
or with --- the molecular changes in the brain.)
(11) Science enables us to take advantage of the continuity of Nature by the
empirical application of certain {XV} principles whose interplay involves diffe
rent orders of idea connected with each other in a way beyond our present compr
ehension.
(Illustration: We are able to light cities by rule-of-thumb methods. We do
not know what consciousness is, or how it is connected with muscular action; wh
at electricity is or how it is connected with the machines that generate it; an
d our methods depend on calculations involving mathematical ideas which have no
correspondence in the Universe as we know it.>)