Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PRACTICE. There is something truly pathetic in the lives of those who preach and do not practice; who revel in the generalities of Philosophy as a sort of intellectual tonic, and are at the same time too lazy to try the formulas and hold fast to that which is good. I desire you to avoid a method of practice that is backed by habit. To take stated times to become good (say Sundays), is not at all after the manner of our system; and if you continually pursue this means, you will grow as fixed as a rock crystal. Life is your business, all kinds of life; rustling among men, eating—drinking— sleeping—just as Christ did; and the best time for you to practice, is all the time. I who give you these instructions, know what life is from its pleasures to its agonies;from its feasts to its graveyards ; and the more of a Philosopher I am, the more do I know of its fulness. So when I tell you to practice, I mean that you are to stay where you are and practice. The great need of the world is the living Philosopher. Cloisters are out of date. Monasteries are old fashioned ; they belong to the middle ages. People must clash with each other in order to live; must feel each other's pulse, and jostle shoulder to shoulder; they must mingle magnetism, I might say, and give and take. In this rush, this hurry, is the time to try your cult and test its value. If you hide a diamond in a box, it loses all its power to be saucy and throw back the sun's rays to the sun; in fact it forgets after a while that it is a diamond at all, and becomes as sullen as a cold pebble. If you have anything good, you must find it out; and you never can do that by shutting yourself up in an occult room and imagining. Do not mistake us; we told you to concentrate, and contemplate the point of a pin,but n...