Non Fiction Authors From Scotland

"The anti-Christ is behind us; it has been, it has done its destructive work, it has gone. Now it has to be "chained down for a time and half a time". This means sealed off to its own domain for the age of Aquarius — that is "the time" — and half the following age, the age of Capricorn, when it will be released again. In the middle of the age of Capricorn the `beast' will be released once more, there will be another great war, this time fought out on the mental planes. That will be the third phase of the manifestation of the anti-Christ. It was the war between the forces of light and the forces of evil, as we call them (the forces of materiality as they are called by the Masters), which destroyed the ancient Atlantean civilization some 100,000 years ago."

"For the last 100,000 years that war has been waged on the astral planes. It was precipitated onto the physical plane in 1939 by Hitler and his group, along with the Italians and the Japanese groups, thus manifesting, for this time, the anti-Christ. Now it has to be sealed off to its own domain. The forces of materiality have a role to play: the upholding of the matter aspect of the planet. If they would do only that, there would be no evil involved. But they do not restrict their activity to the involutionary arc, which is their natural sphere of activity. Their work overflows onto the evolutionary arc, where we are, and is inimical to our spiritual progress; it has, therefore, to be countered. The anti Christ forces are sealed off to their own domain by lifting humanity above the level where they can be used, contacted, influenced, by these materialistic forces. That is the work of the Christ and the Masters in the age of Aquarius which is now beginning."

"There is not an individual who is the devil. You could say the opposite of good is the devil, and that is in every one of us. It is just the selfish, greedy personality expression of individuals."

"We are about to enter an era in which the innate spiritual nature of humanity will begin to express itself in a mass form. Countless millions throughout the world will awaken to the true purpose of their lives. A deeper, more soundly-based attitude to life will develop and people will... come to understand the purpose of their incarnation, and, more and more, they will take a conscious part in their own evolution, creating modes of freedom and justice which this world has never before seen. Freedom and justice, and therefore peace, will allow the divine, spiritual aspect of humanity to come to the fore and be given expression, not only as a religious experience, but in every department of life. In politics, economics and education, in art and science"

"The US stock market, the Dow Jones Index, is at an all-time high. Historically, the major collapses of the US stock market (or any stock market, for that matter) occur when it is at its highest-ever point. The stock markets of the US and Britain are poised, now, for a major collapse, which will become world-wide, and will bring to an end this divisive economic system based on market forces and their corollary, commercialization. p. 6"

"Maitreya calls market forces “the forces of evil”. They have inequality built in them, and benefit the few at the expense of the many. Market forces are based on a great deception: that every nation is trading on a ‘level playing field’, that all the nations are starting from the same point. Obviously, they are not. We cannot compare America, the European states, or Japan, with Tanzania, Zaire or any of the Third-World countries. And yet, through the pre-eminence of market forces, Third-World countries are forced to compete in the world’s markets with countries like Japan, America, Germany and France. Maitreya calls commercialization, which is the tool, the agency, of market forces, more dangerous to the world than an atomic bomb... Commercialization — running life as if it were a business, whether in education or health care, for example — will bring this present civilization to the verge of disaster."

"The developed world usurps and wastes three-quarters of the world’s food, and 83 per cent of all other resources. Therefore, the so-called Third World, with three-quarters of the world’s population, must make do with one-quarter of the world’s food, and only 17 per cent of other resources. As a result, those in the Third World live in utter poverty and degradation, and die in their millions. The developed world sees this as their right to decide who will eat and live, and who will starve and therefore die. I say “they”, but that is us. We are the developed world. We are the ones who are playing God, and deciding who will live and who will die. It is our greed, our selfishness, our complacency that makes possible a situation where millions of people starve to death in a world overflowing with food, a huge surplus per capita. p. 7"

"At the same time in the developed world, because of its worship at the altar of market forces, commercialization is reaching a point where more and more people are being made unemployed. Competition forces companies to cut their expenditure on everything, beginning with people. In every developed country of the world there is growing unemployment, growing crime, and a declining standard of living — less housing, more and more homeless people, and more poverty in the midst of plenty."

"Why do we create such pain and suffering for ourselves and for our brothers and sisters in other countries? Maitreya would say because of complacency, which He says is the root of all evil. When we are complacent, we say: “I am all right, thank you very much. The rest of the world can look after itself.” This comes from the false idea that we are separate. This is the great illusion, the great heresy. Each one of us, whether we know it or not, is a soul in incarnation, a perfect, divine, spiritual Being in incarnation. p. 8"

"Without recognizing it as such, humanity is undergoing a great spiritual crisis that is focused through the political and economic field. That spiritual crisis can only be resolved by the resolution of our political and economic problems, which are based on the false sense of separation. If we would evolve, develop as a race, we must realize our oneness, realize that we are brothers and sisters of one family, under the one Divine Source, and identical with that Source. What happens in a normal family? They share whatever they have. A mother will not feed one child better than another, give one child 17 per cent and another 83 per cent of the food. We have to realize that we are one family, and therefore must share the resources of the world more equitably around the world."

"Maitreya puts it like this: “Sharing is divine. When you share, you recognize God in your brother.” He also says: “The problems of humanity are real but solvable. The solution lies within your grasp. Take your brother’s need as the measure for your action, and solve the problems of the world. There is no other course.” These sound like political or economic solutions. They are actually spiritual solutions, because the problem is a spiritual one."

"We do not know our true identity as souls, as brothers and sisters of the Kingdom of Souls. Maitreya has come, with His group of Masters, to teach us how to live correctly, as brothers and sisters of one humanity, creating therefore freedom for all, justice for all, and peace for everyone. If there is no sharing, there will never be justice in the world; if there is no justice, there will never be peace in the world; if there is no peace, there will be no world, because now we can destroy all life, human and subhuman alike."

"Those who await Maitreya as a religious teacher will probably not recognize Him. He has said: “I have not come to found a new religion; people should continue to evolve within their own tradition, whatever it is.”"

"Maitreya has not come to create followers. In fact, He says: “If you follow Me,” in the sense of running after Him, claiming Him, trying to put Him in your pocket, “then you will lose Me.”"

"Spirituality is the essential nature of our being, simply needing demonstration in outer forms. Whatever we can conceive of as human activity can be, in fact must be, spiritual. True morality is not to do with a code of values which humanity evolves to suit a certain society or a certain religious belief, but something which is intrinsic in our spirituality. p. 136"

"Many people await the return of the Christ with trepidation and fear. They sense that His appearance will promote great changes in all departments of life. His values, they rightly assume, will necessarily alter their ways of thinking and living and they blanch at such a prospect. Besides, so mystical has been the view of the Christ presented down the centuries by the churches that many fear His judgement and omnipotent power; they await Him as God come to punish the wicked and reward the faithful."

"It is sadly to be regretted that such a distorted vision of the Christ should so have permeated human consciousness. No such being exists. In order to understand the true nature of the Christ it is necessary to see Him as one among equal Sons of God, each endowed with full divine potential, differing only in the degree of manifestation of that divinity. p. 30 Full text of this article"

"Though I think that man has from nature the capacity of living, either by prey, or upon the fruits of the earth; it appears to me, that by nature, and in his original state, he is a frugivorous animal, and that he only becomes an animal of prey by acquired habit."

"The rise of every man he loved to trace, Up to the very pod O! And, in baboons, our parent race Was found by old Monboddo. Their A, B, C, he made them speak, And learn their qui, quæ, quod, O! Till Hebrew, Latin, Welsh, and Greek They knew as well's Monboddo!"

"It may be safely asserted, and yet without implying any direct participation in the Monboddo doctrine touching the probability of the human race having once been monkeys, that men do play very strange and extraordinary tricks."

"My lord and Dr Johnson disputed a little, whether the savage or the London shopkeeper had the best existence; his lordship, as usual, preferring the savage."

"There is a language, still existing and preserved among the Brahmins of India, which is a richer and in every respect a finer language than even the Greek of Homer. All the other languages of India have great resem- blance to this language, which is called the Shanscrit. . . . I shall be able to clearly prove that the Greek is derived from the Shanscrit, which was the ancient language of Egypt and was carried by the Egyptians to India with their other arts and into Greece by the colonies which they settled there."

"In the 1795 text, the "History of man" section of Antient metaphysics, it bursts into flower. The "Shanscrit," Monboddo says, is the original language of India and all the other languages of India are dialects that are more or less corrupt; it is "the most perfect language that is, or, I believe, ever was, on this earth; for it is more perfect than the Greek" (Burnett 1779-99, 4:322)"

"As to Duration, I still think it is absolutely impossible to conceive it without something that exists, and continues to exist, i.e. to endure. But how it should be a property of the thing existing is to me inconceivable. One thing... is absolutely certain, viz. that if eternal Duration be a property of the Supreme Being, Duration limited must be a property of inferior beings; so that we have here some common property. I find you agree with Dr Clarke, in considering Time and Duration as the same. But this is an error that Dr Clarke has fallen into, by not being learned in the Ancient Metaphysics; for there he would have learned that time is only the measure of motion. It therefore could not exist, but with the material world; so that, if we could suppose nothing existing but the Supreme Mind, which is immoveable, there would in that case be Duration, or αίών,—as the Greek Philosophers call it—but not χρόνος, or Time. And the Doctor should not have rejected the common distinction, made by all Philosophers and Divines before him, betwixt Time and Eternity, without assigning better reasons than he has done."

"R. C. O. Matthews (1986), "Presidential Address to the Royal Economic Society." as cited in Eggertsson (1990; 31-32)"

"Matthews described himself as writing economic history in the style of an economist. Sceptical of conventional economic models of "rational individualistic utility maximisation", his interests moved toward the institutional and psychological underpinnings of economic behaviour."

"The fundamental idea of transaction costs is that they consist of the cost of arranging a contract ex ante and monitoring and enforcing it ex post, as opposed to production costs, which are the costs of executing a contract."

""The chief fault in English economists at the beginning of the [nineteenth] century was... that they did not see how liable to change are the habits and institutions of industry." Thus Marshall in his inaugural lecture as Professor of Political Economy in Cambridge, referring to Ricardo (Marshall 1885, p. 155). In the circumstances of that occasion, the remark may have been intended in some part as an olive branch, because the only other serious contender for the Chair had been the High Tory economic historian William Cunningham, Archdeacon of Ely, famous as an anti-theoretical institutionalist and famous also as a polemicist - he was the clergyman who once told his congregation that for him the bliss of Heaven would be incomplete if it lacked the pleasures of controversy."

"[Neoinstitutional Economics...] theory has made an indispensable contribution in recent times to advances of understanding in this area. But it seems to me that in the economics of institutions theory is now outstripping empirical research to an excessive extent. No doubt the same could be said of other fields in economics, but there is a particular point about this one. Theoretical modelling may or may not be more difficult in this field than in others, but empirical work is confronted by a special difficulty. Because economic institutions are complex, they do not lend themselves easily to quantitative measurement. Even in the respects in which they do, the data very often are not routinely collected by national statistical offices. As a result, the statistical approach which has become the bread and butter of applied economics is not straightforwardly applicable. Examples of it do exist, the literature on the economics of slavery being perhaps the most fully developed - not surprisingly because slavery is an institution that is sharply defined. But to a large extent the empirical literature has consisted of case-studies which are interesting but not necessarily representative, together with a certain amount on legal court cases, which are almost certainly not representative. Is this the best we can do? There is a challenge here on the empirical side to economists to see what is the best way forward."

"At one master-stroke he forged a new and lasting bond between law, history, and anthropology. Jurisprudence itself has become a study of the living growth of human society through all its stages, and it is no longer possible for law to be dealt with as a collection of rules imposed on societies as it were by accident, nor for the resemblances and differences of the laws of different societies to be regarded as casual."

"Maine brings into the field of inquiry a new element, the element of science in the English sense of the word, that is of exact knowledge based on observation, and aiming at the formulation, of laws. The fact is that Maine did not only stand under the influence of the preceding generation, which had given such an extraordinary impulse to historical research, but also under the sign of his own time with its craving for a scientific treatment of the problems of social life."

"It will be seen that the writer is no friend to Democracy and no great believer in Progress, as the word is commonly understood in politics... However much we may differ with the writer in detail here and there, the article contains much that no serious political thinker will deem himself entitled to overlook."

"Maine challenges it [democracy] as an aristocrat. He agreed with Machiavelli that the world is made up of the vulgar. Civilisation is a hardly-won habit which force created, habit perpetuates, and legal skill protects and elaborates. In Ancient Law we see the germs of modern anthropological methods. Popular Government suggests the psychological studies of Graham Wallas. But the psychological insight is distorted by a tendency to see civilisation as contract writ large."

"In combating what seemed to him the insular arrogance of Bentham and the obscurantism of the legal profession, he emphasised our debt to Rome. He saw Roman law as the institution mainly responsible for the distinction between progressive and stationary societies. This emphasis on Roman law was invaluable. It meant that Maine faced the most difficult problems of history—the effect of borrowing by one people of the institutions of another and the securing of the same social results by different peoples using different methods."

"Maine's direct influence on political thought was to be slight. His influence on the study of law was enormous and therefore his indirect influence on politics has been enormous too. Intending to show law as a growth, he in fact greatly increased our control over it as an instrument."

"I have been reading Maine in the Quarterly—the best anti-democratic writing that we have had. He dined with us this evening: seems really concerned that we have no proper constitution in England: thinks it would be a real gain to have a constitutional code settled by Act of Parliament. Of course it could not have binding force for future Parliaments, but—there is valuable efficacy in the written word; if judiciously written it would be difficult to alter. The genuine alarm that M. seems to feel at the existing state of things in England impressed me much, since his intellect has always seemed to me a very cool and disengaged one."

"Maine has always spoken to me in strong dislike of the acts of Modern Liberals & I believe he was to have stood as a moderate Conservative at Cambridge. I take him to be of the same politics as many of the Liberals of thirty years ago, who are now Conservative. I believe he writes for the St James Gazette & he has written four articles against Democracy in the Quarterly which have attracted a great deal of attention."

"I was deeply impressed with his brilliant intelligence and rare literary instincts. I attended his lectures in Middle Temple Hall (afterwards his book Ancient Law),—the substance of the problems we discussed together."

"It is no mere accident that Maine, who in his Ancient Law undermined the authority of analytical jurisprudence, aimed in his Popular Government a blow at the foundations of Benthamite faith in democracy."

"In reality Maine, with his gift for massive and impressive generalisation, was the tragic voice, sonorous behind the mask of Cassandra, which uttered the feelings that had gathered since the extension of the suffrage in 1867."

"The general argument of Popular Government proceeds from a sort of intellectual anti-intellectualism. Assuming, like some French writers, such as Renan and afterwards Tarde, that aristocracy is the mother of all real progress, and holding that the multitude has been the enemy of all fruitful novelty, Maine argues that democracy, whatever its love of change during its militant phase, will in its triumphant phase pass into a Chinese stationary State."

"History does not furnish Maine, as it furnished Acton, with any guiding thread of growing freedom; and the process towards contract does not appear in the issue to be a process towards liberty. What History proves is the rarity and fragility of democracy. History has with Maine, what it tends to have with many of us, a way of numbing generous emotions. All things have happened already; nothing much came of them before; and nothing much can be expected of them now."

"We want to help to better the conditions for our own people. We want to see our people raised, not into a society of State ownership, but into a society in which, increasingly, the individual may become an owner. There is a very famous sentence of Sir Henry Maine's, in which he said that the progress of our civilisation had been of recent centuries a progress on the part of mankind from status to contract. Socialism would bring him back from contract to status."

"He says that Primogeniture has been of very great political service. I admitted this, but objected that there is another side to the question, that Primogeniture embodies the confusion between authority and property which constitutes modern Legitimacy, that Legitimacy has, in this century, acted as an obstacle to free institutions, and that a one-sided judgment thrown off as that sentence is, gives a Tory tinge to the entire paper. He answered, "You seem to use Tory as a term of reproach." I was much struck by this answer—much struck to find a philosopher, entirely outside party politics, who does not think Toryism a reproach, and still more, to find a friend of mine ignorant of my sentiments about it."

"What pure reason and boundless knowledge can do, without sympathy or throb, Maine can do better than any man in England."

"Maine's nature is to exercise power, and to find good reasons for adopted policy. Augustus or Napoleon would have made him Prime Minister. He has no strong sympathies, and is not at heart a Liberal, for he believes that Manchesterism will lose India. He considers also that the party, especially Lowe, has treated him less well than Salisbury. He is intensely nervous and sensitive. After that, I may say that I esteem him, with Mr. Gladstone, Newman, and Paget, the finest intellect in England."

"Whether - and this is the last objection - the age of aristocracies be over, I cannot take upon myself to say. I have sometimes thought it one of the chief drawbacks on modern democracy that, while it gives birth to despotism with the greatest facility, it does not seem to be capable of producing aristocracy, though from that form of political and social ascendency all improvement has hitherto sprung."

"The natural condition of mankind (if that word "natural" is used) is not the progressive condition. It is a condition not of changeableness but of unchangeableness. The immobility of society is the rule; its mobility is the exception. The toleration of change and the belief in its advantages are still confined to the smallest portion of the human race, and even with that portion they are extremely modern."

"The delusion that Democracy, when it has once had all things put under its feet, is a progressive form of government, lies deep in the convictions of a particular political school, but there can be no delusion grosser."

"The prejudices of the people are far stronger than those of the privileged classes; they are far more vulgar; and they are far more dangerous, because they are apt to run counter to scientific conclusions."