The Sixth Sense: Its Cultivation and UseBrent, Charles Henry
Religion
The Sixth Sense: Its Cultivation and Use
Brent, Charles Henry
New Thought
“Let us, for one thing, never forget that physical health
is not the true end of human life, but only one of its most
important means and conditions.... Death may and should be
risked, the slow but certain undermining of the physical health
may be laudably embarked on, if only the mind and character
are not damaged, and if the end to be attained is found to
be necessary or seriously helpful, and unattainable by other
means.”[11]
Secondly, special and mystical means of promoting or regaining health
must have as a background the accumulated knowledge and scientific skill
of the day. If there are individual exceptions here and there, they go to
prove the rule. We can no more ignore the history of medical and chemical
science, the findings of the microscope and laboratory, without disaster,
than we can cut our country off from the traditions, laws and customs
of yesterday without similar results. On the other hand, it is at least
equal folly to flout or discredit the mystical experience of the ages.
Human life, individually and corporately, is a unit, and due recognition
must be given to all that goes to make it up.
CHAPTER III
IN RELATION TO THOUGHT
The mind includes the Mystic Sense in somewhat a similar way to the
manner in which the body includes the physical senses. But the Mystic
Sense can be, indeed must be, considered as a distinct faculty having a
peculiar function in the formation of that product of the mind called
thought, which is “the effort to win over facts to ideas, or to adjust
ideas to facts.”[12] The Mystic Sense can and does operate when the
rationalizing faculty is reverently silent, and by its operation prepares
new material for pure reason to consider.
There is no specifically intellectual organ. It is the whole man which
apprehends knowledge just as it is the whole man and not an exclusively
religious part of him, which apprehends and is apprehended by eternities
and infinities. It is popularly supposed that science and mathematics
call for the exercise of one set of faculties, and philosophy and
religion another. Whereas the truth is that the same faculties are used
for all alike in pretty much the same relation to one another. The Mystic
Sense is as indispensable to science as it is to piety. Its method of
operation is precisely the same in the one sphere as in the other.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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