Psycho-Phone Messages

by Francis Grierson

It has taken woman some centuries to rise to power, but the work is only half done. Never can the commercial instinct and the intellectual ideal be made to harmonize. The two spheres of consciousness are totally distinct.

The modern intellect has been organized without considering the moral meaning of its activity. This has caused the delusion that the crowning glory of European culture is the dreadnaught. Ninety per cent of all modern inventions are for bodily destruction or bodily comfort. While the body lolls in luxury, the spirit is soused in lethargy.

As Ouspensky says, we have created two lives—one material, the other spiritual. I believe this is owing to the fact that man is living and working in the material and woman in the spiritual. In other words, she is carrying her own responsibilities on one shoulder and man’s baneful burdens on the other. The figure of Atlas holding up the Globe should be changed to that of a female.

One would think that in these days, when psychology is taught even to children, that a man who has lived forty years in the world of action would know better than to boast of his eternal activities. The word “busy” has grown to be a veritable fetish with thousands who have little or nothing to do. The truth is, most men are not half as busy as they seem and not more than a fourth as wise as they look.

We have to find out by exact analysis just what incentive lies behind people’s actions. What makes the distinction is the quality of our acts. Everything in the material and the spiritual worlds is judged according to quality. Gold, diamonds, clothes, bricks, music, poetry, literature, are adjudged, in the last resort, on the basis of intrinsic value. When people are engaged in pursuits for the sake of money the results will be on a plane with the quality of the incentive.

In the work done by women in the past fifty years in this country, the incentive has been of a higher quality than that shown by men.

While men introduced a coarse realism into the novel, women saved the situation by new ideals. I do not think there would be much left worth reading today but for woman’s taste and judgment.

In the world of intellect and emotion things hang together. A low plane of intellect will produce low impulses. The more we know the greater our control of the different sense organs. Nothing can happen without a corresponding cause behind it.

The hysteria so common at great political conventions is caused by the exceedingly limited intelligence of the managers and directors who labor under the illusion that blind impulse is tantamount to vision. In other words, where the critical faculties are not developed anything can happen. And it is not difficult to predict that when political conventions are swayed by hysterical temperaments the authority at the White House will have all he can do to steer the Ship of State through the troubled waters of impulse and confusion.

There is a will to power that is blind. There is another will to power that brings the higher emotions to bear on the lower impulses, controls and directs the organs of sense.