The Hidden Power, and Other Papers upon Mental Science

E-text prepared by Kevin Handy, John Hagerson, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)
Late Divisional Judge, Punjab. Honorary Member of the Medico-Legal Society of New York. First Vice-President International New Thought Alliance
NEW YORK
ROBERT M. McBRIDE & COMPANY
Copyright, 1921, by S. A. Troward All rights reserved
Sixth Printing September 1936
Printed in the United States of America
The material comprised in this volume has been selected from unpublished manuscripts and magazine articles by Judge Troward, and The Hidden Power is, it is believed, the last book which will be published under his name. Only an insignificant portion of his work has been deemed unworthy of permanent preservation. Whenever possible, dates have been affixed to these papers. Those published in 1902 appeared originally in EXPRESSION: A Journal of Mind and Thought, in London, and to some of these have been added notes made later by the author.
The Publishers wish to acknowledge their indebtedness to Mr. Daniel M. Murphy of New York for his services in the selection and arrangement of the material.

To realise fully how much of our present daily life consists in symbols is to find the answer to the old, old question, What is Truth? and in the degree in which we begin to recognise this we begin to approach Truth. The realisation of Truth consists in the ability to translate symbols, whether natural or conventional, into their equivalents; and the root of all the errors of mankind consists in the inability to do this, and in maintaining that the symbol has nothing behind it. The great duty incumbent on all who have attained to this knowledge is to impress upon their fellow men that there is an inner side to things, and that until this inner side is known, the things themselves are not known.
There is an inner and an outer side to everything; and the quality of the superficial mind which causes it to fail in the attainment of Truth is its willingness to rest content with the outside only. So long as this is the case it is impossible for a man to grasp the import of his own relation to the universal, and it is this relation which constitutes all that is signified by the word Truth. So long as a man fixes his attention only on the superficial it is impossible for him to make any progress in knowledge. He is denying that principle of Growth which is the root of all life, whether spiritual intellectual, or material, for he does not stop to reflect that all which he sees as the outer side of things can result only from some germinal principle hidden deep in the centre of their being.