The Secret Life: Being the Book of a HereticBisland, Elizabeth
Philosophy
The Secret Life: Being the Book of a Heretic
Bisland, Elizabeth
Diaries
If fresh rose leaves are shut closely into a drawer until they have
thoroughly dried and crumbled, they will be found, when removed,
entirely scentless, but the drawer will retain for years some
intangible emanation which they have given off, and this will permeate
any object left in the drawer. Recent delicate experiments have shown
how the violence of emotion will affect the weight of human beings, and
no doubt, in supreme crises of feeling, living bodies may lose this
weight by the throwing off of some emanation which may linger for a
long time in the immediate surroundings. It has been discovered that
many objects retain luminosity, after being long exposed to powerful
rays; a luminosity invisible to our sight, but sufficient to make
dim photographs upon highly sensitized plates. The "ghosts" are very
probably explicable on some such theory as this. Some individuals
are like these extremely sensitive plates. The emanations thrown out
in the condition of intense emotion affect them, and give them an
impression of sounds or sights which appear, in our present state of
ignorance, to be supernatural. Of course, any psychologist or scientist
would pooh-pooh this hypothesis of mine, if it were made public, but
equally they would have sniffed fifty years ago at a guess at wireless
telegraphy, or the Roëntgen ray, or the radioactivity of radium. After
all, however, they are right in thinking that guesses are not very
valuable unless one has the industry to demonstrate their accuracy.
December 20.
Amateur Saints.
If there is any one thing more particularly repulsive to me than
another it is the way the average clerical person speaks of religious
things. One would suppose that such matters, if one really believed
them, would be the profoundest sentiments of one's nature, and be
mentioned with the reserve and reverence with which the lay person
treats the deeper sentiments, such as love, honour, or patriotism.
A little pamphlet came by mail to-day, which proved to be a sort of
begging letter from a community of Protestant clergymen, who are
undertaking to imitate monasticism in America. Under a heading of a
cross is this text, "If we have sown unto you spiritual things, is it a
great matter if we shall reap your worldly things?" And there follows
an appeal for assistance in building a monastery on the Hudson. The
language of this pamphlet is the usual language of begging letters,
only with that flavour of smug religiosity and bland business-like
dealing with matters of the soul which amazes the lay mind.
This community of, presumably, able-bodied men who desire to reap of
our worldly things naively sets forth in the following programme the
manner in which they intend to occupy their time:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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