Clarence Darrow was an American lawyer. He remains notable for his wit and agnosticism, which marked him as one of the most famous American lawyers and civil libertarians.
In this book, Darrow expands on his lifelong contention that psychological, physical, and environmental influences—not a conscious choice between right and wrong—control human behavior. To my ears (the reader's), the author has a rather simplistic behaviourist view of human behaviour, but he argues his position with wonderful clarity. Darrow is coherently critical of conspiracy laws, of the creation of laws by the powerful (and consequently the definition of "crime" by that group) .... and his views on the machinery of "justice" and on how criminals are treated are still very relevant.
This work describes and analyzes several cases of pathological behavior. The interest comes not only from the cases themselves, but also from the of-its-time analysis which is mired in what we now know to be wrong thinking about mental illness, sexuality, gender, and race. - written by Mary Schneider
Theophrastus ( c. 371 – c. 287 BC) was an ancient Greek philosopher, successor to Aristotle in the Peripatetic School. He wrote on many topics: biology, geology, physics, metaphysics, psychology, ethics, logic – and more. His book Characters… contains thirty brief, vigorous, and trenchant outlines of moral types, which form a most valuable picture of the life of his time, and in fact of human nature in general. They are the first recorded attempt at systematic character writing. “Apart from slight variations of local coloring and institutions, the descriptions of the old Greek philosopher might apply almost as well to the present inhabitants of London or Boston as to the Athenians of 300 B.C.” This edition contains an extensive and informative introduction to the man and his thought.
Oskar Pfungst book is a detailed piece of investigative journalism looking into Clever Hans, an Orlov Trotter horse that was claimed to have performed arithmetic and other intellectual tasks. Pfungst details the results of many experiments, by the end of which he is able to explain exactly how Hans did it. This classic example of the observer-expectancy effect is still relevant today, as the "Clever Hans effect" has to be taken into account whenever a study of animal intelligence takes place.
Life is self-realization. Every birth is divine. We are born anew every morning. My wish is that you may catch the gleam, be freed from limitations and enter upon your boundless possibilities. To bring you into the throne-room of your being, that you may awaken in self-realization, is why I have prepared this course of lessons. Should you give five minutes a day to them, in a year you will know the joy there is in Life, in Power, and in Service. (from the text)
"It is quite generally recognized that psychology has remained in the semi-mythological, semi-scholastic period longer than most attempts at scientific formulization. For a long time it has been the "spook science" per se, and the imagination, now analyzed by M. Ribot in such a masterly manner, has been one of the most persistent, apparently real, though very indefinite, of psychological spooks. Whereas people have been accustomed to speak of the imagination as an entity sui generis, as a lofty something found only in long-haired, wild-eyed "geniuses," constituting indeed the center of a cult, our author, Prometheus-like, has brought it down from the heavens, and has clearly shown that imagination is a function of mind common to all men in some degree, and that it is shown in as highly developed form in commercial leaders and practical inventors as in the most bizarre of romantic idealists. The only difference is that the manifestation is not the same." - Albert H. N. Baron, in translator's preface to Essai sur l'imagination créatrice
Old buildings necessarily have a history. It is not always a happy history and folklore abounds. Sometimes unhappy souls come back to haunt the current residents or their guests. Whether you believe in ghosts or not, these narratives provide a fascinating insight into the history of the buildings and the hysteria they may induce.
“Society lies under the spell of ancient terrorism and coagulated errors. Science is either wilfully hypocritical or radically misinformed.”
John Addington Symonds struck many an heroic note in this courageous (albeit anonymously circulated) essay. He is a worthy Virgil guiding the reader through the Inferno of suffering which emerging medico-legal definitions of the sexually deviant were prepared to inflict on his century and on the one which followed. Symonds pleads for sane human values in a world of Urnings, Dionings, Urano-Dionings and Uraniasters - in short, the whole paraphernalia of Victorian taxonomies and undigested Darwinism which, superimposed on the “terrorism” of religion, labelled and to some extent created the specimen “homosexual.”
A discussion of the “manly love” poems of Walt Whitman leads the author to speculate on a better future for the criminalised mutual passions of men; yet he is obliged to defer the dream, for “the world cannot be invited to entertain it.”
“Mr. B. Russell Herts, c/o International Magazine, New York City.
Under separate cover I am sending you a record of a young man who is about to commit suicide. My only object is that it may help…to ease the way for some who come after…. I do not sign this, but you may verify my death by communicating with Mr. ——, whom I am writing to-day, so that he may look after my effects in New York.”
The body of a well-dressed young man was found off Manhattan Beach, Sept. 28, 1913. In his pockets a torn photograph of Strindberg and receipts for three registered letters were found. These receipts were traced to Mr. Herts and to friends in Toronto, one of whom identified the body on Oct. 2d as that of Wallace E. Baker. –From the book’s Forward.
This little book, whose design is to lead the devout Bible student into the Green Pastures of the Good Shepherd, thence to the Banqueting House of the King, and thence to the service of the Vineyard, is one of the abiding legacies of Mr. Hudson Taylor to the Church. In the power of an evident unction from the Holy One, he has been enabled herein to unfold in simplest language the deep truth of the believer's personal union with the Lord, which under symbol and imagery is the subject of The Song of Songs. (From the Foreword by J Stuart Holden).
Wilhelm Stekel was an Austrian physician and psychologist and one of Freud’s earliest followers. This title, originally published in 1921, was the author’s favorite of his own work. Covering a variety of topics he takes a psychoanalytic look into The Depths of the Soul.
"In the following Letters I have endeavoured to exhibit in their true light the singular natural phenomena of which old superstition and modern charlatanism in turn availed themselves—to indicate their laws, and to develop their theory." (from the Preface of the book)
In 14 letters, British physiologist Herbert Mayo (1796-1852) is giving the reader an overview of popular superstitions of previous times, like vampirism, somnambulism or even ghost sightings, and exposing how in previous times they were treated with fear, ignorance and intolerance, often leading to crime, while he endeavours to give rational explanations for the phenomena with the goal to find treatments and cures for the afflicted.