Mentality and Freedom, by W.A. Fairburn (1917)

William Armstrong Fairburn · Secret Doctrine's Third Proposition Series · 268 pages

*A complete scanned book of 268 pages and about fifteen megabytes — one of the heaviest files in the library and slow to open. It carries a text layer, so a reader can search inside it, though the character recognition is rough in places and some words come out garbled. It is Mentality and Freedom: Essays* by William Armstrong Fairburn, published by The Nation Press of New York in 1917 and dedicated by the author to his two sons.

Fairburn was an industrialist and engineer rather than a theosophist, and the book is a set of eight numbered essays with no titles, listed on the contents page only by number and page. Its subject is the one that earns it a place in this section: the waste of human mental capacity. The average man, the first essay begins, has depths of possibilities that are never reached, inherent capabilities that are never utilised, and valuable potentialities that lie for ever dormant, undeveloped and even undiscovered in the substratum of his personality. Few even of our so-called successful men, he argues, could truthfully be termed efficient when their actual achievements are compared with the great possibilities afforded by their mental equipment; on every hand there are men of five talents using one, and that indifferently. The image he returns to is a biblical one — the human mind is composed of many attributes or talents which, instead of being brought forth for use and service, are carefully wrapped in napkins and hidden away in the archives of cerebral oblivion. His conclusion is stated as an economic claim with a moral edge: there is a waste in the world today far greater than any that economic statistics can measure, and more serious than the most reckless extravagance with nature's materialistic resources — the waste of men's minds. Since the Third Proposition is about the giving of mind to man, a book about what men do with the mind they were given sits in this section deliberately.

Read the full text (PDF, 14.8 MB, 268 pages)