a. Difference between Poetry and Prose:
1. Poetry is “set to music,” and the rhythm carries part of the message.
2. This unreality or distance from life makes it more complete and beautiful in itself.
3. The emotions and imagination picture completeness more easily than the intellect:
α. Because the desire for completeness is a feeling.
b. Completeness and understanding in Poetry:
1. Metaphor and simile a relationing of far-off things.
2. Symbol in Play replaces them:
α. The Fairy-story.
3. Taking sides destroys poetry.
4. Exaggerated and conventional phrases are weak because they are insincere.
II. Art in Music:
a. Music is itself harmony and completeness:
1. The most intangible and removed, it is yet the most satisfying symbol of completeness and harmony.
III. The Opera:
a. Its attempt to combine all the Arts in one harmonious expression.
IV. Art in Painting:
a. Unity or completeness in painting:
1. Point of interest; with radiating lines, balance, and other means of making it prominent.
2. The cycle of colors, complete color, and the contrast of light and darkness.
3. A story, not embodied in the picture itself, but needing words of explanation, spoils unity.
4. Unnecessary detail, detracting from central interest and motive, also spoils unity.
b. Truth in painting:
1. Falseness of photographic truth, because of its lack of unity and purpose.
α. The “out-of-focus” and imaginatively planned photograph sometimes artistic.
2. Perspective, the painter’s vision of the single complete experience.
3. To see beauty in things is to see the truth.
4. “Prettiness,” the result of catering to the shortcomings of the spectator’s taste, is a violation of the artist’s taste or sense of completeness and truth.
5. Knowledge of life (anatomy) is necessary:
α. One must understand life to portray it.
V. Sculpture:
a. The Greek Drama of the visual Arts:
1. The unlifelikeness of the material, the removal from life, makes it more beautiful, and a truer symbol.
b. Expresses idea through attitude of the human form.
VI. Architecture:
a. Like music’s, its appeal is to the emotions, without definite sense or lifelikeness; but speaks as life itself.
b. To be complete, it must express outwardly its inner use and meaning.
c. To be sincere, or true, it must express the spirit of land and people.
[Note.—This ninth meeting might profitably be divided into two.]
TENTH MEETING
Shall We Make an Art of Life?
I. Truth, Goodness and Beauty, but the Greatest of these is Beauty, Which Combines the Other Two:
a. Science is knowledge of facts.
b. Philosophy is vision of truth or aim.
c. Art is using our knowledge to create what we seek. Action and purpose.
II. Art is Self-expression, Creation, Action, Relationing:
a. All life, all being, is action, or self-expression.
b. All power in the world is imaginative, creative thought-power:
1. All things must be imagined before they can be known or done.
III. All Great Action, All Goodness, All Power in Life Follows the Same Laws as Art:
a. Therefore let us discover the laws of all arts, and see whether they can be applied to life.
IV. The Message of All the Arts:
a. All have the same laws:
1. Art is the symbol of completeness in a definite shape.
2. Is self-expression and self-fulfilment.
3. Must leave out the unimportant.
4. Must have variety and many-sidedness.
5. Must not be partisan, and must be sympathetic.
6. Must give the impression of truth.
7. Must be aloof, that is, separate from life, and see things, as it were, from a distance, in their wholeness.
V. Review and Conclusion:
a. Each smallest thing can symbolize the whole:
1. Each human life is a symbol of the complete Self, in a definite shape.
2. Each is deserving of reverence:
α. Reverence is the small self awed before its own vastness.
[Note.—As the eleventh meeting was somewhat of a digression, and as the notes taken were covered in later meetings, it is here omitted.]
TWELFTH MEETING
What is Goodness?
I. Each Life, to be Good or Beautiful, Must be a Symbol of that Perfect or Complete Life for Which We Long:
a. Life—the symbol of complete Self in a definite shape.
b. The good man makes all he knows and touches a complete, harmonious whole:
1. Goodness is always of relation.
2. One cannot be perfect till all are so:
α. Therefore goodness implies modesty.
II. False and True Good:
a. The one law of Love, and its petty, changing codes:
1. True good of changing harmonious relation.
2. False good of outworn custom and rule.
III. The Meaning of Self-expression:
a. The small and large Self:
1. The whole world is the whole of me.
2. Serve, not others only, but others as part of yourself.
b. Self-sacrifice:
1. Giving up one thing for a greater thing.
2. Happiness is whatever we want most.
3. If completeness is the aim of life, then all lesser happiness is sacrificed to it.
4. If life is a drama, a whole, we give up our selfish satisfaction to see that whole self satisfied.
c. Creation is Self-expression, is endless, higher rebirth:
1. All action reveals the actor.
2. Life is a drama, in which we feel ourselves to have equal prominence with others, and conscious power of control:
α. We cannot help having influence.
β. Let us shape our influence for the whole.
THIRTEENTH MEETING
Self-fulfilment Through Overcoming Limitations
I. Envy, Its Narrowness and Blindness:
a. Every man serves me who does for me what I cannot do for myself:
1. Each one fills out my shortcomings.
b. Use, instead of coveting.
II. Self-regulation in Despite of Self:
a. The moral sense of beauty, an intellectual sense of completeness, makes us regulate and suppress our desires:
1. Hence we make laws which are substitutes for understanding love.
b. The substitutes necessary until love conquers, are:
1. Justice.
2. Honesty.
3. Duty.
4. Binding by promise.
5. Obedience.
c. Conventions, their changes and their convenience.
III. Some Virtues Changed by Love’s Demands:
a. Revenge, the first expression of Loyalty:
1. Our admiration for such expression in its own early time.
b. Pity, the developer of Feeling:
1. Degenerates into Weakness and Impotence.
2. Is an Insult:
α. A strong man does not pity himself. Should not pity other strong selves.
3. Strong Sympathy, and our common Working for the great Happiness, should replace pity.
c. Reverence for special people, with Fear:
1. Self-reverence means reverence for all selves.
2. Reverence the old—and the young, too.
3. The reverence with love replaces the reverence with fear.
FOURTEENTH MEETING
Loyalty, and Conscious Allegiance to our Individual Aspiration
I. Patriotism; its Meaning:
a. We are children of all we can love and serve:
1. The growth of loyalty, from the family to the world:
α. War as a fighting for peace.
b. Patriotism in its growth, like all progress, must include the small in the large, though in seeming disloyalty:
1. Disloyalty to one’s country cannot be loyalty to the world.
2. But wholesome criticism often seems disloyal:
α. The loyalty of revolutionists.
II. Conscious Choice in Self-development:
a. Know what you want most to be.
b. Eliminate whatever interferes with your choice; make life a work of art, not a haphazard photograph.
1. Concentration.
2. Choose and subordinate your studies for their worth to you.
3. Prefer friends to acquaintances.
4. Do the work at hand (charity at home), and be sure your service harmonizes with your knowledge and your whole life.
5. Never degrade the end by making an end out of the means. (Business, athletics, study, must always be means.)
c. Dare to desire the utmost, unflinchingly:
1. Greatness comes from persistent desire rather than from inborn skill.
d. Youth and old age:
1. Desire and service can continue throughout life.
III. Variety and Rhythm:
a. Varied life with single Aim:
1. Concentrate on one thing at a time, but not on one thing all the time.
2. The meaning and worth of Knowledge.
3. Never be bored, or bore:
α. Sense of humor; and use of silence.
4. Work and play, exertion and rest, must harmonize:
α. Even your pleasures will reflect your character, or taste.
b. Be a rhythm, a measure, a force like music in the life all about you.
[Note.—The fifteenth meeting was spent on Christian Science, and is therefore omitted from the notes.]
SIXTEENTH MEETING
Social Relations
I. The Avoidance of Bitter Partisanship:
a. Take sides, not with persons, but with causes.
b. Use all. Be for all, and against none.
II. Social Sympathy:
a. Humanity as a vast Self:
1. Democracy means we have all the right to be equal:
α. Faith and reverence for self in all.
β. Service is larger self-service.
γ. Each does his part; hand and head.
2. To keep well, to be satisfied, we must care for the sick and miserable:
α. Starvation.
β. Old age.
γ. Contagion.
b. To care for the weak strengthens the strong:
1. To destroy the weak is dangerous loss. (Rome and Sparta.)
c. In passing judgment on crimes, hate not persons but their acts:
1. Each acts according to his desire or needs.
2. Punishment as preventive and cure.
III. Truth in Personal Relations:
a. Truth-telling not the whole of Truth:
1. Malicious truth-telling is not truth.
2. Worth of kind, true criticism and praise.
b. Our judgments of people judge us:
1. Our limited understanding.
2. Say: “I am one who hates, or loves,” etc.
c. Whom shall we please, and how?
1. The morality of good manners.
2. Vanity, the pretended worth; and true worth or loveableness.
3. “Prettiness” in manner, pleasing those who cannot understand us.
4. Social frivolity, overdress and luxury, and its result of friendship.
α. Show is for those we do not love. (Resembles “costly material” in art.)
[IV. Women and Work:
a. The true preparation for marriage.
b. Social life and service.
c. Knowledge as mere show; or as power.]
SEVENTEENTH MEETING
Aloofness and Creation
I. Seeing Life as a Spectator, from God’s Point of View:
a. The collective personality:
1. Psychological fact: We are often outside ourselves in tense moments.
2. Getting far away from oneself in self-criticism and judgment.
3. Our reasonableness in crises.
4. All heroism is self-forgetfulness for the sake of the whole.
II. Result in Action and Creative Living:
a. Partnership with whole, or God:
1. We can see and use our personal life as part of whole.
2. We can get above our own sorrow and pain, and use them.
b. This aloofness from self, or being the One, is the root of all morals:
1. Some know this, and make laws; the others are forced to obey.
c. Aloofness is collective experience, or memory, whence we grow toward the good. We live in all time and space.
III. Personal Result of Our Club’s Work:
a. Drawing judgment from the whole.
b. Drawing strength from the whole.
c. Training our lesser desires to serve the whole aim and desire of our life.
d. How shall we attain to fulfilment in our personal life?
1. Money, health, power, etc., as certificates of creative value, to be used for new creation.
Hyphenation and archaic spellings have been retained as in the original. Punctuation and type-setting errors have been corrected without note. Other corrections are as noted below.
Page 37, and he saw that an ==> and we saw that an
Page 91, God,” I answered ==> God,” she answered
page 93, so; but a word itself ==> so; work itself
Page 104, a sense of duty ==> a sense of unity
Page 236, different from each one ==> different for each one
Page 266, if the operator always ==> is the spectator always