The Psychology Of Mans Possible Evolution

These lectures, originally entitled Six Psychological Lectures, were privately printed in 1940 for the Historico-Psychological Society in London. One hundred twenty-five copies were printed and fifty were bound, but none were sold. The lectures were first published in New York in 1950, three years after Ouspensky's death, by the Hedgehog Press, Inc., under the title The Psychology of Man's Possible Evolution. The book consisted of five lectures as the second and third lectures of Six Psychological Lectures were combined into one, but the text was identical with the 1940 printing in England; only the spelling was Americanized. In 1954 Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., took over publication from the Hedgehog Press, and, in 1974, produced a second edition of The Psychology of Man's Possible Evolution. This included "Notes on the Decision to Work," which has since been published with its two companion essays, "Notes on Work on Oneself" and "What Is School?," in Conscience: The Search for Truth (1979).

The present edition contains the verbatim account of a meeting of one of Ouspensky's London groups on 23 September 1937. Ouspenky's answers to the questions raised at this meeting deal with some of the difficulties in understanding the fundamental ideas of a system belonging to "The Fourth Way," the principles and methods of organization of schools, and the importance of rules. The original account of this meeting, corrected and amended in Ouspensky's own handwriting, is in the P. D. Ouspensky Memorial Collection in the Manuscript and Archives Department of Yale University Library, and is published here for the first time by permission of the Librarian.

Dettagli