"W. Scott-Elliot - Atlantis" - читать интересную книгу автора (Elliot W Scott)

The Story of Atlantis by W. Scott-Elliot



The Story of Atlantis
A Geographical, Historical and Ethnological Sketch
by W. Scott-Elliot
[1896]
Preface to the First Edition
by A. P. SINNETT
For readers unacquainted with the progress that has been made in recent years by
earnest students of occultism attached to the Theosophical Society, the
significance of the statement embodied in the following pages would be
misapprehended without some preliminary explanation. Historical research has
depended for western civilization hitherto, on written records of one kind or
another. When literary memoranda have fallen short, stone monuments have
sometimes been available, and fossil remains have given us a few unequivocal,
though inarticulate assurances concerning the antiquity of the human race; but
modern culture has lost sight of or has overlooked possibilities connected with
the investigation of past events, which are independent of fallible evidence
transmitted to us by ancient writers. The world at large is thus at present so
imperfectly alive to the resources of human faculty, that by most people as yet,
the very existence, even as a potentiality, of psychic powers, which some of us
all the while are consciously exercising every day, is scornfully denied and
derided. The situation is sadly ludicrous from the point of view of those who
appreciate the prospects of evolution, because mankind is thus wilfully holding
at arm's length, the knowledge that is essential to its own ulterior progress.
The maximum cultivation of which the human intellect is susceptible while it
denies itself all the resources of its higher spiritual consciousness, can never
be more than a preparatory process as compared with that which may set in when
the faculties are sufficiently enlarged to enter into conscious relationship
with the super-physical planes or aspects of Nature.
For anyone who will have the patience to study the published results of psychic
investigation during the last fifty years, the reality of clairvoyance as an
occasional phenomenon of human intelligence must establish itself on an
immovable foundation. For those who, without being occultists--students that is
to say of Nature's loftier aspects, in a position to obtain better teaching than
that which any written books can give--for those who merely avail themselves of
recorded evidence, a declaration on the part of others of a disbelief in the
possibility of clairvoyance, is on a level with the proverbial African's
disbelief in ice. But the experiences of clairvoyance that have accumulated on
the hands of those who have studied it in connection with mesmerism, do no more
than prove the existence in human nature of a capacity for cognizing physical
phenomena distant either in space or time, in some way which has nothing to do
with the physical senses. Those who have studied the mysteries of clairvoyance
in connection with theosophic teaching have been enabled to realize that the
ultimate resources of that faculty range as far beyond its humbler
manifestations, dealt with by unassisted enquirers, as the resources of the
higher mathematics exceed those of the abacus. Clairvoyance, indeed, is of many
kinds, all of which fall easily into their places when we appreciate the manner