The Dore Lectures on Mental Sciencel. Thomas Troward

      FOREWORD.

      The addresses contained in this volume were delivered by me at

      the Dore Gallery, Bond Street, London, on the Sundays of the

      first three months of the present year, and are now published at

      the kind request of many of my hearers, hence their title of "The

      Dore Lectures." A number of separate discourses on a variety of

      subjects necessarily labours under the disadvantage of want of

      continuity, and also under that of a liability to the frequent

      repetition of similar ideas and expressions, and the reader will,

      I trust, pardon these defects as inherent in the circumstances of

      the work. At the same time it will be found that, although not

      specially so designed, there is a certain progressive development

      of thought through the dozen lectures which compose this volume,

      the reason for which is that they all aim at expressing the same

      fundamental idea, namely that, though the laws of the universe

      can never be broken, they can be made to work under special

      conditions which will produce results that could not be produced

      under the conditions spontaneously provided by nature. This is a

      simple scientific principle and it shows us the place which is

      occupied by the personal factor, that, namely, of an intelligence

      which sees beyond the present limited manifestation of the Law

      into its real essence, and which thus constitutes the

      instru-mentality by which the infinite possibilities of the Law

      can be evoked into forms of power, usefulness, and beauty.

      The more perfect, therefore, the working of the personal factor,

      the greater will be the results developed from the Universal Law;

      and hence our lines of study should be two-fold--on the one hand

      the theoretical study of the action of Universal Law, and on the

      other the practical fitting of ourselves to make use of it; and

      if the present volume should assist any reader in this two-fold

      quest, it will have answered its purpose.

      The different subjects have necessarily been treated very

      briefly, and the addresses can only be considered as suggestions

      for lines of thought which the reader will be able to work out

      for himself, and he must therefore not expect that careful

      elabora-tion of detail which I would gladly have bestowed

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