"Mysticism is produced by the combustion of the gray vascular matter in the sensorium—the thalami optici and the corpora striata." (P. 355.)
"Prayer is a liberation of force. When the emotions are excited, rapid combustion of nervous tissue ensues, and the desire that inevitably follows to do something is the signal that an amount of power has been generated, and equilibrium is disturbed." (P. 387.)
"Pantheism," we are told, p. 292, "is the philosophy of reason—of reason, it may be, in its impotence," (most assuredly!) "but of such reason as man is gifted with here."
On page 319, speaking of Kant, he says, "All the arguments advanced by metaphysicians to prove the existence of God crumbled into dust beneath his touch." The truth is precisely the opposite. Kant has "crumbled into dust," and "all the arguments adduced by metaphysicians to prove the existence of God" remain as unshaken as before he was born.
We are told, on page 79, that the chief reason why all men have believed in the immortality of the soul, is because they could not form even a conception of its annihilation. On the contrary, any one who has ever slept soundly can conceive its annihilation without any difficulty, though he might experience a good deal in endeavoring to picture to himself an existence without end. The doctrine of the immortality of the soul, however, even in philosophy, does not rest on any such weak arguments.
That most wonderful fact of history, in which the finger of God evidently appears, namely, the preservation of the Jewish people and their belief for the past eighteen hundred years, in the face of causes which, according to every natural law, ought long ago to have destroyed both creed and nation, is accounted for (p. 205) simply by their possession of "the Talmud, which is a minute rule of life," etc. Credat Judæus Apella.
"A man of thought will not steal, because he knows he is violating a law of sciology." (P. 278.) Were all the men in the world "sciologists," and "men of thought," we would not be in the least inclined to trust our property to the slender protection afforded by a law of "sciology."
Every native of the "Gem of the Ocean" will be delighted to learn that "The suffering Celt has his Brian Boroimhe, ... who will come again ... to inaugurate a Fenian millennium," (p. 407;) and students of history will be surprised to know that
"Marie Antoinette was informed of the execution of Robespierre by a woman in the street below the prison putting stones in her apron, and then, with her hand falling on them, scattering them on the ground." (P. 187.)
Marie Antoinette was not alive when Robespierre was executed. The above incident occurred in the life of Josephine Beauharnais.