Theodore Flournoy

From India to the Planet Mars Theodore Flournoy

Book Excerpt: ...know. To grasp the whole of its manifestation, we should have to follow it into an unseen world. Yet scientific faith bids us believe that there, too, there is continuity; and that the past and the future of that force which we discern for a moment are still subject to universal Law."Out of the long Stone Age our race is awakening into consciousness of itself. We stand in the dawn of history. Behind us lies a vast and unrecorded waste--the mighty struggle humanam condere gentem. Since the times of that ignorance we have not yet gone far; a few thousand years, a few hundred thinkers, have barely started the human mind upon the great aeons of its onward way. It is not yet the hour to sit down in our studies and try to eke out Tradition with Intuition--as one might be forced to do in a planet's senility, by the glimmer of a fading sun. Daphni, quid antiquos signorum suspicis ortus? The traditions, the intuitions of our race are themselves in their infancy; and before we abandon ourselves to brooding over...