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Page 117 of 1211929 · PDF PAGE 51
51 mentioning that he had been up the Matterhorn, some tactless person interrupted, "Did they tie your legs!" Mummery, Collie and Hastings from England, with Eckenstein and one or two minor lights on the one hand, and Purtscheller, Blodig and others from Germany on the other, were setting up an entirely new standard of Alpine climbing. They were men of education and intelligence; they had studied the physical theory of mountain conditions; they had practised the various types of technique required to meet these conditions in detail. They were d…
1929 · PDF PAGE 293
… proper examination. He would not approach the body. Forrest and I cut off the clothes. There were some curious wounds caused, in my judgment, by the attempts of some of the coolies to relieve the symptoms. They were none of them serious in themselves. The main visible symptom was large patches of extravasated blood. The doctor refused point blank to make a post-mortem and said he would give his certificate that death was due to erysipelas. He then bolted. His next act was to remember that erysipelas was a notifiable infectious disease and that…
1929 · PDF PAGE 386
… secret and incommunicable relations of the poet with his own individual idiosyncrasies. I admit that my visions can never mean to other men as much as they do to me. I do not regret this. All I ask is that my results should convince seekers after truth that there is beyond doubt something worth while seeking, attainable by methods more or less like mine. I do not want to father a flock, to be the fetish of fools and fanatics, or the founder of a faith whose followers are content to echo my opinions. I want each man to cut his own way through t…
1929 · PDF PAGE 77
…s these barbarous absurdities as excrescences on Christianity, but they are of the essence of the religion. The whole theory of the atonement implies that man can set up his own will in opposition to God's, and thereby excites Him to anger which can only be pacified by the sacrifice of His son. It is, after all, quite as reasonable to think of God as being irritated by a shipbuilding programme as by idolatry. The tendency has, in fact, been to forget about the atonement altogether and to represent Jesus as a "Master" whose teachings are humanit…
1929 · PDF PAGE 350
… had undergone seven years' penal servitude for burglary, and suppose Lloyd George treats me with the contempt I deserve. Well, at the moment there may be a few people silly enough to believe such nonsense, and to think that his allowing the statement to go unchallenged makes it probable that there is some truth in it. But consider what the biographers will say? They will discover that Lloyd George's time was fully accounted for without the penal servitude, and they will simply wonder what spirit of insanity possessed me to make so ridiculous a…
1904 · PDF PAGE 122
… so, though w e aspire to renounce the pleasures of s ense, to love and pity all that lives, yet perhaps we often fail in the accom plishment of our aspiration. But if the desire to becom e pitiful and pure be but honest and earnest, we have gained the Second Step upon the Path—Sammasankappo, Right Aspiration. “He whose motives are pure has no need to conceal the Truth—he who truly loves and who has a m alice towards none, will ever speak only fair and s oft words. By a man’s speech do we learn his nature, and that one whose Right Aspirations a…
1929 · PDF PAGE 208
208 I have never been able to analyse this mental attitude at all adequately, but part of it certainly derives from the fact that I have never lost my innocence. I sometimes wonder whether it may not prove a defect in my philosophical system that I am unable to believe in the existence of evil. There is of course the appearance of evil due to ignorance, bad judgment and so on; but my major premiss is "Every man and every woman is a star."; and I always conceive the problem of progress as depending merely on enlightenment. I do not believe in or…
1929 · PDF PAGE 153
…rstand that all the syllogisms of optimism were enthymemes. Every telology depends on the error of generalizing from a few selected phenomena. The boy impressed me more than the pagoda. One was the freak of misfortune; the other the considered climax of colossal care. Yet both were transitory and trivial toys of time. I went back to Rangoon profoundly penetrated by the insight which enabled the Buddha to attain understanding of the import of the cosmos. Ever since leaving Ceylon I had been almost constantly down with malaria. In Rangoon the fev…
1929 · PDF PAGE 130
…ever thought, or think now. No less a critic than Marcel Schwob called it "a little masterpiece". And many other people of taste and judgment have professed themselves in love with it. Possibly the simplicity of its realism, its sincere and shame-free expression of every facet of my mind, constitute real merit. It is certainly true that most people find much of my work hard to read. The intensity of my passion, the profundity of my introspection, and my addiction to obscure allusions, demand the reader serious study, that he may grasp my meanin…
1929 · PDF PAGE 314
… of change, no hope of any alleviation of its anguish, each exquisitely mindful that its captain had slain himself in despair; there may men pass today in peace. What with The Book of the Law to guide them, and my experience to warn them, they can prepare themselves for the passage; and it is their own fault if the process of self-annihilation involves suffering. I cannot even say that I crossed the Abyss deliberately. I was hurled into it by the momentum of the forces which I had called up. For three years, save for spasmodic and half-hearted …
1929 · PDF PAGE 534
…e how stupid the rest were, to disdain the bluff of the advertising adepts, and to realize that genuine magicians were necessarily gentlemen and scholars. He felt himself utterly lost in the darkness of Detroit, but despaired of mending the matter by setting forth to seek the Graal without guidance. He was {842} so fixed in doubt and distrust that even the truth, soiled by his suspicion, could not quell the whispers of the demons of denial. They persistently persuaded his shaking soul that the weeds of falsehood grew so rank that never a seed o…
1929 · PDF PAGE 211
… mind is in no way creative or even critical in the true sense of the word. He was a scholar. He would convince himself by elaborate argument that So-and-so was the greatest of all artists; and he would then endeavour to discover the secrets of the master in the spirit of the analytical chemist, and proceed to paint with the most pitiful perseverance in the style of his latest hero. I possess sketches by Kelly which I defy the world to distinguish from Beardsley, Rossetti, Morris, G.F.Watts, etc. Robbie Ross once told me of a man who collected …
1929 · PDF PAGE 474
…iny of a people. I looked for what the Americans call the "man higher up". I did not look in the direction of honest, well-meaning, sentimental von Bernstorff with all his capacity for routine, his noble credulity, his quite genuine desire to arrange everything amicably, and his hackneyed training in the diplomatic service with its hamstrings of etiquette and its chessboard punctilio. I did not look towards von Papen, with his stultifying conviction that he was so much cleverer than anybody else; still less towards Boy-Ed, who was a breezy nava…
1904 · PDF PAGE 118
…ng, “There is a raising of the right foot,” and so on, just as it happens. The thought is of course not quick enough to note all the movements or their subtle causes. For example, we cannot describe the c ompli- cated muscular contractions, &c. ; but this is not necessary. Concentrate on some series of simple movements. When this through habit becomes i ntuitive so that the thought is really “T here i s a raising,” as opposed to “I raise” (the latter being in reality a complex and adult idea, as philosophers have often shown, ever since Descart…
1929 · PDF PAGE 296
…banquet which his heavenly hospitality had prepared for the meanest and mouldiest of mankind. The mandarin was one of the most beautiful men I have ever seen. I use the word beautiful in its strictly aesthetic sense. He was, I judge, between thirty-five and forty years old; his features were astonishingly perfect and {483} their expression full of noble intelligence and lofty benevolence, harmonized by a placidity due to a consciousness of his superiority so unbroken and unquestioned that it had been absorbed into subconsciousness. He was a mir…
1906 · PDF PAGE 278
… the telescope by the motion of the planets, or by the clockwork of his re- flector, but that you should do so is absurd. Scept. Yet all men do so and have ever done so. see him writhing in eternal torture — that physiological impossibility—for his word ‘‘a casual carpenter,” albeit he wrote it in rever- ence. That is the kind of Christian 1 would hang. The Christian who can write as Our Champion of Christendom does about his faith is innocuous and pleasant, though in my heart I am compelled to class him with the bloodless desperadoes of the ‘‘…
1929 · PDF PAGE 203
…me to see Kelly in his studio. His conversation was full of the most intensely interesting, because impersonally intimate, details about men of letters. He told us at first hand the tragedy of Meredith's life, the mystery of his birth, and his father's attempts to establish a marriage with would have entitled him to a place in the peerage; the romance of Vittoria; and the intrigue of Diana of the Crossways. He traced the influence of the master's locomotor ataxia upon his life, his character and his creatures. He explained how the long years of…
1929 · PDF PAGE 17
17 the Lord's Table. It is almost inconceivable that any gathering of human beings, united to celebrate the supreme sacrament of their creed, should have been destitute of any means of safeguarding common decency. But the fear of the priest was paramount; and the entire meeting waited and fidgeted for over an hour in embarrassed silence. Ultimately, a baker named Banfield got up trembling in inquired timorously: "May I ask Mr. Clapham if it is Mrs. Clapham's intention to break bread this morning" Mrs. Clapham then bounced out of the room and sl…
1929 · PDF PAGE 12
…r him." It seems possible that this early impression determined his course in later life when he came to take up Magick; for the one document which gripped him was The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin the Mage, in which the essential work is "To obtain the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel". It is very important to mention that the mind of the child was almost abnormally normal. He showed no tendency to see visions, as even commonplace children often do. The Bible was his only book at this period; but neither the narra…
1929 · PDF PAGE 330
…ore or less; but her condition became rapidly worse and in the autumn of 1911 she had to be put in an asylum, suffering from alcoholic dementia. Another seed of the past began to bear fruit at this time. I had never attempted to transmit my occult knowledge as such. I had never attempted to write prose, as such, apart from short accounts of my climbs, with the exception of the preface to White Stains (Collected Works, vol. II, pp. 195- 8). Berashith was my first serious attempt at an essay. That and "Science and Buddhism" were followed by a jeu…