XXVIII.
5, 6.—“... given in our hand,
Is power the evil hazard to command.”
“That which is thoughtlessly credited to a non-existent intelligence should really be claimed and exercised by the human race. It is ourselves who should direct our affairs, protecting ourselves from pain, assisting ourselves, succouring and rendering our lives happy. We must do for ourselves what superstition has hitherto supposed an intelligence to do for us.... These things speak with a voice of thunder. From every human being whose body has been racked with pain; from every human being who has suffered from accident or disease; from every human being drowned, burned, or slain by negligence, there goes up a continually increasing cry louder than the thunder. An awe-inspiring cry dread to listen to, against which ears are stopped by the wax of superstition and the wax of criminal selfishness. These miseries are your doing, because you have mind and thought and could have prevented them. You can prevent them in the future. You do not even try.”—R. Jefferies (“The Story of My Heart,” pp. 149 et seq.).
Id.... “From one philosophical point of view, that of Du Prel, the experiments are already regarded as proving that the soul is an organising as well as a thinking power.... Bernheim saw an apoplectic paralysis rapidly improved by suggestion.... The more easily an idea can be established in the subject, the quicker a therapeutic result can be induced.... I think that hardly any of the newest discoveries are so important to the art of healing, apart from surgery, as the study of suggestion.... Now that it has been proved that even organic changes can be caused by suggestion, we are obliged to ascribe a much greater importance to mental influences than we have hitherto done.”—Dr. Albert Moll (“Hypnotism,” pp. 122, 318, 320, 325, 327).
Id.... “It would, I fancy, have fared but ill with one who, standing where I now stand, in what was then a thickly-peopled and fashionable part of London, should have broached to our ancestors the doctrine which I now propound to you—that all their hypotheses were alike wrong; that the plague was no more, in their sense, Divine judgment, than the fire was the work of any political, or of any religious, sect; but that they were themselves the authors of both plague and fire, and that they must look to themselves to prevent the recurrence of calamities, to all appearance so peculiarly beyond the reach of human control.... We, in later times, have learned somewhat of Nature, and partly obey her. Because of this partial improvement of our natural knowledge and of that fractional obedience, we have no plague; because that knowledge is still very imperfect and that obedience yet incomplete, typhus is our companion and cholera our visitor. But it is not presumptuous to express the belief that, when our knowledge is more complete and our obedience the expression of our knowledge, London will count her centuries of freedom from typhus and cholera as she now gratefully reckons her two hundred years of ignorance of that plague which swooped upon her thrice in the first half of the seventeenth century.”—T. H. Huxley (“On Improving Natural Knowledge”).
And the pestilent malady from which woman specially still suffers is as definitely the result of man’s ignorant or thoughtless misdoing, and is as indubitably amenable to rectification, as the plague of the bye-gone ages, or the typhus and cholera of the present.
8.—“... pain both prompts and points escape.”
“All evil is associated more or less closely with pain ... and pain of every kind is so repugnant to the human organism, that it is no sooner felt than an effort is made to escape from it.... Alongside of the evolution of evil there has ever been a tendency towards the elimination of evil.... The highest intellectual powers of the greatest men have for their ultimate object the mitigation of evil, and the final elimination of it from the earth.”—Richard Bithell (“The Creed of a Modern Agnostic,” p. 103).