As we went along the passages, the doors of the cells kept
opening, and we were joined by young men and women, who spoke to me or
to each other, but all in the same subdued voices, till at last we
entered a big, bare, arched room, lit by high windows, with rows of
seats, and a great desk or pulpit at the end. I looked round me in great
curiosity. There must have been several hundred people present, sitting
in rows. There was a murmur of talk over the hall, till a bell suddenly
sounded somewhere in the castle, a door opened, a man stepped quickly
into the pulpit, and began to speak in a very clear and distinct tone.
The discourse--and all the other discourses to which I listened in the
place--was of a psychological kind, dealing entirely with the relations
of human beings with each other, and the effect and interplay of
emotions. It was extremely scientific, but couched in the simplest
phraseology, and made many things clear to me which had formerly been
obscure. There is nothing in the world so bewildering as the selective
instinct of humanity, the reasons which draw people to each other, the
attractive power of similarity and dissimilarity, the effects of class
and caste, the abrupt approaches of passion, the influence of the body
on the soul and of the soul on the body.
Pages:
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141