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Oriental Religions and Their Religion to Universal Religion
Oriental Religions and Their Religion to Universal Religion Author:Samuel Johnson Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ADVENT OF THE RELIGION OF PERSONAL WILL. ITS ELEMENTS. SYMBOLISM. '"INHERE is an epoch in our experience when we become -- conscious of ourselves as indivi... more »duals, distinct from the world of forces, natural and human, into which we were born. Before this beginning of our proper personality, we are more or less passive products, either of contemplation and imagination, or of traditional routine; in other words, we are either dreamers or plodders, — in the one case, drifting waves of abstract mind; in the other, atoms of a concrete mass. In neither have we become centres of special force. In neither have we learned that our estimate of the objective world depends upon what we personally know and feel and do, and, substantially, upon what we are. That " We receive but what we give, And in our life alone doth Nature live," is as true of the child as of the man, of the poor creature as of the hero or the saint. But the moral and spiritual possibilities involved in this constant law are realized only through the consciousness of ourselves as distinct from our surroundings, and, as it were, polar to them. This is the condition of progress, — that we know ourselves to be centres of productive force. The organ of this conscious personality, the force which it brings into play for purposes of power and growth, is the Will. Strictly denned, Will is the concentration ofmind on the selection, from among the infinitude of objective forms, of that which suits the subjective desire, and the transforming of it from a thought to a thing in the shape of that desire, from an ideal to a real or actual image of it, — a transfer from brain to hand. And as one really worships that by which he is most deeply moved, so the ideal, the truly sovereign power for this stage of self- consciousness,...« less