The Art of Creation; Essays on the Self and Its Powers  (English, Paperback, Carpenter Edward)

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: II THE ART OF CREATION 1 In speaking of " The Art of Creation "—as there may be some ambiguity about the expression—I wish to say that my object is to consider by what process or method things are made to appear and exist in the world. This may seem a bold matter to discuss; but it has, of course, been the subject of philosophy time out of mind. Forty or fifty years ago the materialistic view of the world was much in evidence. We all at that time were automatons; and it was the fashion to regard human beings as composed of enormous crowds of material atoms, by whose mechanical impacts all human actions were produced, and even certain mental phenomena in the shape of consciousness were evolved as a sort of by-product. Since then, however, partly through a natural reaction and partly through the influx of Eastern ideas, there has been a great swing of the pendulum, and a disposition to posit the Mental world as nearer the basis of existence and to look upon material phenomena rather as the outcome and expression of the mental. In the later part of last century we looked uponCreation as a process of Machinery; to-day we look upon it as an Art. 1 Given originally as an address. But as no theory or view of things in general is of much value unless founded on actual observation in detail, I should like the reader to consider how things we know about actually do come into existence. And since it is best in such cases to observe things that are near us and that we know most about, I propose that we should first consider how our own Thoughts and Actions and Bodily Forms come into existence. Let us take our Thoughts first. We have only to indulge in a few moments' rest, and immediately we become aware that our mind is peopled by a motley crowd of phantoms. We seem to see ...