The word yoga conjures up in the minds of many Westerners images of people performing exercises and adopting unusual, sometimes contortive postures. Such exercises and postures do have a place within the practice of yoga, but it is much more than that. Indeed, the early literature on yoga describes and defines it as a form of mental rather than physical discipline. Yoga is also associated with the Indian subcontinent and the religions of Hinduism and Buddhism. This book therefore concentrates on (...) the evolution of yoga in the context of Indian culture, though the final chapters also explore some of its links with non-Indian mystical traditions and some of its developments outside of India during the modern period. The book is aimed at both university students taking courses in Comparative Religion and Philosophy and practitioners of yoga who seek to go beyond the activity and explore its spiritual dimensions. Hence, it presents yoga in the context of its historical evolution in India and seeks to explain the nature of its associations with various metaphysical doctrines. The work also draws upon a number of conceptual schemes designed to facilitate comparative study. Some of these are employed throughout the book so as to link the material from each chapter together within a common framework. (shrink)

The title of this book by the late Joyce Cary suggests that some theory of the relations between art and reality will be propounded. Such in fact is the case, but it is not a theory of aesthetics in the comprehensive sense—nothing so rigidly ambitious as Maritain’s book on Creative Intuition. This book is based on the Clark Lectures for 1956 and on some Oxford lectures on the novel given in 1952. It is the kind of very English book which (...) Continental aestheticians tend to despise—the general theory so loosely jointed together, the analogies drawn between the arts so superficial, the many lacunae left gaping in the structure. If however one shares the English critical tradition it will certainly be found a more meaningful book than a flock of the other kind. (shrink)

This is a stimulating but maddening book, for the author opens the gate on several fascinating avenues of thought but does not give himself time to explore them for any great distance. It could have been a much more important book of its kind for it is the seminal kind badly needed in Christian circles at the moment. It attempts to build bridges between certain areas of life and thought recently discovered to be virtually sealed off from each other—notably between (...) liturgical cultus, secular culture and modern industrial society. From ‘an explicitly Catholic angle’ but in very fresh terms it links together the liturgical movement, Scriptural studies and the Church’s social teaching and suggests new perspectives so that these may open up freely to one another. (shrink)

This is a neat pocket-size edition of the original Pantheon production which lacks the sixty-eight plates in black and white, the “texts without comment” for seven of the nine chapters, and “many footnotes and references”. These accessories however had never much relevance, even illustrative, to Mr. Maritain’s “philosophy of art”, and believers have all the nine Mellon lectures here—and a monumental work in its kind—very cheaply for about ten shillings. The work has been amply reviewed since its first publication, and (...) since then Mr. Maritain has been put severely in his place in many quarters. Let it suffice therefore to indicate once again that the book will be valued by those for whom the phrase “philosophy of art” makes sense, and that among these few artists, critics or intimate lovers of this or that art are likely to be found. (shrink)

This 1957 lecture is the tenth in the Eddington Memorial series which “deal with some aspect of contemporary scientific thought considered in its bearing on the philosophy of religion or on ethics.” Poetry would seem to be the outsider here. But Professor Wood shares a contemporary concern over “the growing divergence between the young scientific culture and the traditional literary culture”, and insists that the University must hold to its function of enlarging the intellectual imagination and so must keep poet (...) and scientist on intelligible speaking terms. Commendably enough he himself tries to draw them together under the flag of a particular quotation—Shakespeare’s. (shrink)

This is a ‘study of Liberal Humanism in the novels of George Eliot, Henry James, E M Forster, Virginia Woolf and Angus Wilson’. The ‘free spirit’ is the person who, ‘freed’ of traditional or customary morality, has to learn an empirical or consequential morality in relations with other people and reconcile this with self-fulfilment as a new and conscious ideal. Such a spirit typifies the offspring of J S Mill and the liberal middle-class culture of the late nineteenth century with (...) its reliance on historical progress, the power of reason, tolerance and individual freedom. The dilemma of the contemporary liberal is summarised in an introductory chapter which does not however attempt any analysis more radical than the usual one. When the international conflicts of the twentieth century undermined its confidence liberalism lost its creative energy in the fields of political action and social reform, yet many middle-class people of liberal bent still retain in their private lives amidst an alien society a liberal-humanist morality of personal relationships worked out according to the motives and foreseen consequences of their actions. Certain characters and themes handled by the above line of novelists show their awareness of this liberal programme and its complications. (shrink)