Classic Books

Within yourself lies the cause of whatever enters into your life. To come into the full realization of your own awakened interior powers, is to be able to condition your life in exact accord with what you would have it.

Ralph Waldo Trine was a philosopher, mystic, teacher and author of many books, and was one of the early mentors of the New Thought Movement. His writings had a great influence on many of his contemporaries including Ernest Holmes, founder of Religious Science. He was a true pioneer in the area of life-transforming thought. No other New Thought author has sold more books than he, his writings reaching far beyond New Thought circles out to the general public, which has bought and read Trine’s books without ever knowing that they were New Thought.

The true story of an individual’s struggle for self-identity, self-preservation, and freedom, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl remains among the few extant slave narratives written by a woman.The book documents Jacobs’ life as a slave and how she gained freedom for herself and for her children. Jacobs contributed to the genre of slave narrative by using the techniques of sentimental novels “to address race and gender issues.” She explores the struggles and sexual abuse that female slaves faced as well as their efforts to practice motherhood and protect their children when their children might be sold away.

John Hendricks was bear-leading at the time. He had originally studied for Holy Orders, but had abandoned the Church later for private reasons connected with his faith, and had taken to teaching and tutoring instead. He was an honest, upstanding fellow of five-and-thirty, incorruptible, intelligent in a simple, straightforward way. He played games with his head, more than most Englishmen do, but he went through life without much calculation. He had qualities that made boys like and respect him; he won their confidence. Poor, proud, ambitious, he realised that fate offered him a chance when the Secretary of State for Scotland asked him if he would give up his other pupils for a year and take his son, Lord Ernie, round the world upon an educational trip that might make a man of him.

The object of this little book is to offer a survey of the remarkable civilisation which arose in ancient India thousands of years ago and which influenced not only the manners, religion and customs of the people of the Malaya Archipelago and Indo-China, but gave also a thin veneer of culture to the nomads of Central Asiatic steppes, through her commercial enterprise and religiouspropaganda.

Fully illustrated. The connection between Christianity and Buddhism is unmistakable, both in terms of the traditional narratives of the respective founders, and in their attributed sayings. Arthur Lillie here examines possible historical linkages between the two religions from a critical, rationalist, viewpoint. For some reason, there is what appears to be a missing gap of several paragraphs somewhere in the later pages; a numbered list of astrological signs starts with the number 3. This is how the text was and I have no explanation for this. Chapters include: S’iva; Baal; Buddha; “The Wisdom Of The Other Bank”; King Asoka; The Mahâyâna; Avalokitishwara; The Cave Temple And Its Mysteries; Architecture; The Essenes; The Essene Jesus; More Coincidences; Rites; Paulinism; Transubstantiation; and more.

A book, which places before the reader not only those basic and fundamental principles, but also indicates how we can help to fulfill them through our freedom by establishing a polity and social life, and through the instrumentality of a constitution and the dedication of the human material which this vast country will now throw up to work without any external fetters or internal inhibitions, will be welcomed by all. Shri R. K. Prabhu has proved his skill in making a selection of the most telling and significant passage from Mahatma Gandhi’s writings and have no doubt that this volume will be a useful addition to the literature on the subject.

What is India? I make no apology for answering the question in the words used by Lord Dufferin at the St. Andrew’s dinner, Calcutta, on November 80, 1888, for they give the most vivid picture of what we mean by India that has been drawn in a few lines. ‘It is an Empire,’ he said, ‘equal in size, if Russia be excluded, to the entire Continent of Europe, with a population of 250,000,000 souls.

Such ghost stories are a source of pleasure, and are read as a pastime and are often vastly enjoyed, because though the reader is a bit afraid of what he does not know, still he likes to be assured that ghosts do not in reality exist.

This book deals with the myths and legends of India, which survive in the rich and abundant storehouse of Sanskrit literature. The reader is introduced to the various sacred works of the Hindus. Reprint, with illustrations.

Tense quiet filled the crooked streets of Bromfield, the quiet that presages storm. Vine Larimore looked anxiously from the window. She was not afraid of tempests: she reveled in them. But a great fear had gripped her in the night. Why had Calvin failed to stop on his way home from the station? What business was it that took Calvin Stone to Rochester every week or two? Another sweetheart? She would not give the hideous thought house room. Was not she, Lavinia Larimore, the handsomest girl in Bromfield? Was not her father, next to the Calvins and the Stones, the most important man in the rusty old New York village? Had she not worn Calvin’s ring for three endless years? Most of the girls in her set were already married, and at New Year’s she had worn the green stockings for her seventeen-year-old sister, Isabel. The wedding dress she had made with so much care and skill, two years agone, hid its once modish lines beneath the cover of the cedar chest—the hope chest that Calvin had ordered for her at Stephen Trench’s shop

These tales are remarkable not just for the range of Indian places and situations they describe or their wealth of historical detail but also for their sensitive and by and large fair representations of both British and Indian characters. Kipling takes on the thorny issues of empire, race, miscegenation and the practice of ???going native’, and uses them as literary tropes, to examine human culture, religion and society.

Planetfall.
Here the forest was green and cool. A soft, damp wind promised rain. The colonists moved down the ramp, staring at the crew members piling crates of supplies in the meadow beyond.
Frowns. Then whispers.
Saxon glanced up. His nostrils flared. “Hurry,” he told the crewmen, and came forward, beaming. He was tired. It showed in his feverish, too-bright smile as he said, “Afraid Engineering’s a little behind schedule. They’ll be here tomorrow morning to erect your city. Tonight you’ll have to rough it.”

“Are you an unusually persevering and persistent person? Or, like most of us, do you sometimes find it difficult to stick to the job until it is done? What is your usual experience in this respect?
“Is it not this, that you work steadily along until of a sudden you become conscious of a feeling of weariness, crying “Enough!” for the time being, and that you then yield to the impulse to stop?” -An excerpt

Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development’ is an 1883 book by Francis Galton, in which he covers a variety of psychological phenomena and their subsequent measurement. In this text he also references the idea of eugenics and coined the term for the first time. (courtesy: wikipedia)

I take it for granted therefore that inspiration is an admitted fact, so that my only business is to consider how far it carries us, and what security it gives us for certain, reliable, infallible truth, in all the statements of the inspired word. – Edward Hoare

First published in the year 1891, the present book ‘Intentions’ was written by Oscar Wilde. It is a collection of literary essays that present his views on art and criticism. Wilde’s aesthetic philosophy and his commentaries on art, literature, criticism, and society asserts the philosophy of ‘art for art’s sake’: art is an end in itself, and literature does not need to convey didactic lessons to be valuable.

The young Duc de Hardimont happened to be at Aix in Savoy, whose waters he hoped would benefit his famous mare, Perichole, who had become wind-broken since the cold she had caught at the last Derby,—and was finishing his breakfast while glancing over the morning paper, when he read the news of the disastrous engagement at Reichshoffen.

“This book is intended essentially as an “Introduction,” and does not aim at giving an exhaustive discussion of the problems with which it deals. It seemed desirable to set forth certain results, hitherto only available to those who have mastered logical symbolism, in a form offering the minimum of difficulty to the beginner. The utmost endeavour has been made to avoid dogmatism on such questions as are still open to serious doubt, and this endeavour has to some extent dominated the choice of topics considered. The beginnings of mathematical logic are less definitely known than its later portions, but are of at least equal philosophical interest. Much of what is set forth in the following chapters is not properly to be called “philosophy,” though the matters concerned were included in philosophy so long as no satisfactory science of them existed.” -Introduction

In the annals of Invention and Discovery, it may be said without undue boasting, no nation of modern times can lay claim to such an eminent position as Great Britain; and her many ingenious and intrepid adventurers into what they found unknown regions of the arts, the sciences, and the earth’s surface, have so largely contributed to raise her to her great place and power, that it is mere justice and self-interest to bestow on them grateful rewards in life, and renown after death. In this little volume are brought together a number of sketches and memoranda, illustrating the history of discovery, and the lives and labours of inventors and explorers, not of our own country alone, but of others—for knowledge is of no country, but of all. The object of the collector has been rather to present the popular than the strictly scientific side of his subject—to furnish materials of interest and amusement, as well as instruction; and if now and then he has been tempted to stray into bye-paths of anecdote and gossip, excuse may readily be found in the fact that the private life of our men of science, often singularly noble and full of character, is apt to be altogether obscured by the brilliancy of the results of their secret and silent toil. This volume will have served its purpose, if it excites an appetite for fuller and deeper inquisition into the sources of British greatness and of modern civilisation.

“To show that inventors have accomplished more than most persons realize, not only in bringing forth new mechanisms, but in doing creative work in many walks of life, is, in part, the object of this book. To suggest what they may do, if properly encouraged, is its main intention. For, since it is to inventors mainly that we owe all that civilization is, it is to inventors mainly that we must look for all that civilization can be made to be.” -Preface