The Unknowable

“ The worst of it is that he has a haunting apprehension that even the bit of knowledge which he calls his own may be taken away from him by some new discovery, and he may be cast adrift upon the Unknowable. ”

“ In such sermons as those on the "Intermediate State," the "Invisible World," the "Greatness and Littleness of Human Life," the "Individuality of the Soul," the "Mysteriousness of our Present Being," we may see exemplified the enormous irruption into the world of modern thought of the unknown and the unknowable, as much as in the writers who, with far different objects, set against it the clearness and certainty of what we do know. ”

“ Ignorance, superstition, singular illusions, symbolisms, these with many others are causes of that unconscious element, often found in customs, which now constitutes for us the unknown and the unknowable. ”

“ That mysterious Unknown or Unknowable is no cruel darkness, but simply an impenetrable distance into which we are impotent to glance, but which excludes no legitimate speculation and forbids no reasonable hope. ”

“ But to recognise that the soul of a man is unknowable, is the ultimate achievement of wisdom. The final mystery is oneself. When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens star by star, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul? ”

“ The extent of the region of the uncertain, the number of the problems the investigation of which ends in a verdict of not proven, will vary according to the knowledge and the intellectual habits of the individual Agnostic. I do not very much care to speak of anything as "unknowable." [82] What I am sure about is that there are many topics about which I know nothing; and which, so far as I can see, are out of reach of my faculties. ”

“ As for the faithful adherents of the unknown, who had long understood that we must resign ourselves to understanding nothing and he prepared for every sort of surprise there was here, all the same, even for them, a mystery of another character, a bewildering mystery, the only really strange mystery, more torturing than all the others together, because it verges upon ancestral fears and touches the most sensitive point of our destiny. ”

“ She feared the unknown as we all do, and her ignorance made the unknown infinitely vast. ”

“ Surely, that is mystery enough. You may say, if you like, that this feeling of mystery is because of our ignorance; nevertheless, it is there."
"Yes," she replied. "But the trouble is that, in so far as we have discovered mysteries, they turn out to be of the most prosy and commonplace nature. Things that were once unknown, and appealed to the world as romantic, now that they are known are just as prosy and uninteresting as the commonplace. Directly a thing is known it becomes humdrum. I went to a lecture one night given by a scientist—an astronomer, in fact. ”

“ Poor people! the sterility of their imagination is a eulogy on their credulity! I own that, if I had felt the want of persuading my readers I had penetrated into the walled city, I should have adopted a completely different course. My experience of things human taught me, a very long time ago, that the Unknown usually conceals a deception, and I should simply have expressed my surprise at having seen nothing surprising! ”

“ They suggest blows struck from without by an Unknown even more unknown than that which we think we know, an Unknown which is not that of the universe, not that which we have gradually made into an inoffensive and amiable Unknown, even as we have made the universe a son of province of the earth, but a stranger arriving from another world, an unexpected visitor who comes in a rather sinister way to trouble the comfortable quiet in which we were slumbering, rocked by the firm and watchful hand of orthodox science. ”

“ The incomprehensible is harder to portray in a story than is merely the unknown. If we denote anything incomprehensible by the symbol X, we can describe what X is to a certain extent by knowing what it is not. ”

“ Believe me, Hester, there are few things,—whether in the outward world, or, to a certain depth, in the invisible sphere of thought,—few things hidden from the man who devotes himself earnestly and unreservedly to the solution of a mystery. ”

“ Heavens! what fools there are in this world, who call themselves wise men! This little poetaster, full of the conceit common to his imitative craft, is ‘inclined to admit’ that there are great possibilities in the study of the invisible! Excellent condescension! How the methods of life have turned topsy-turvy since the ancient days! Then the study of the Invisible was the first key to the study of the Visible,—the things which are seen being considered only as the reflexes of the things which are unseen—the Unseen being accepted as Cause, the Seen as Effect. ”

“ There are only things not yet known,' and I thought, 'Yes, we're getting near our goal. We've conquered ignorance and superstition and illiteracy. And as time goes on we'll know more and more things. The area of the unknown will constantly diminish. Knowledge is like an expanding circle of light that eats into the darkness.' Then the darkness came. And you didn't know."
"We know what happened well enough," Rossiter corrected. ”

“ But it has occurred to me that you may have the conceit of your own mystery, that you may take rather too much pleasure in mystifying people as to your identity."
"That is unkind,—that is unkind," and he spoke without resentment, but softly, with a falling cadence. ”

“ As long as you are pursuing the unknown, this movement is in operation. There is something that you can do that gives you the hope that maybe one day you will stumble into this experience of the unknown. How can the unknown ever become the known? ”

“ The Invisible Man had him down grimly, but his arms were free and he struck and tried to kick savagely.
"Listen to reason, will you?" said the Invisible Man, sticking to him in spite of a pounding in the ribs. "By Heaven! you'll madden me in a minute!
"Lie still, you fool!" bawled the Invisible Man in Kemp's ear.
Kemp struggled for another moment and then lay still.
"If you shout, I'll smash your face," said the Invisible Man, relieving his mouth.
"I'm an Invisible Man. It's no foolishness, and no magic. I really am an Invisible Man. ”

“ For although it has not, perhaps, been incontrovertibly proved that the unknown is neither vigilant nor personal, neither sovereignly intelligent nor sovereignly just, or that it possesses none of the passions, intentions, virtues and vices of man, it is still incomparably more probable that the unknown is entirely indifferent to all that appears of supreme importance in this life of ours. ”

“ It 's bad enough to let these floundering yokels explode my little secret, without your cutting off with my books. It 's lucky for some of them they cut and ran when they did! Here am I— No one knew I was invisible! ”

“ We call the Unseen—the great gamble. I have shown how all else betrays—how all matter is a mockery at the last—that even love and friendship fail for those who are called to weep and worship wholly at the tomb of the body.... The truth is out: The beginnings of real teaching is in making the Unseen interesting and dramatic. ”

“ I am not referring to the ordinary unknown person who may at any time be brought into the commonplace class of the known and the recognized. I mean the Unknown Man himself, the authentic Unknown Man whom nobody knows. ”

“ He has that unpleasant lack of knowledge of what comes beyond. For after all, with the most intense belief in the world, it is hard to reconcile the comforting feeling of what one knows with that terrible dread of the unknown. ”

“ I have my own theory as to just what becomes of us when we—the real, thinking we, that is—enter that somewhat uncanny realm which men have agreed to let ignorance call unconsciousness. But this is neither the time nor place to air it. ”

“ No human being ever thoroughly understood any other human being, I suppose,—and yet no human being knows himself. If you search yourself, you find mystery. If you ask others, you find double mystery. Perhaps that is the knowledge which is reserved for the Divine."
"That is true," responded Norcross. ”

“ The things I Don’t Know glow—each one separately—with a small precise lantern-brightness of its own.
Also in my wide background are things I don’t know and am unaware of it: the mass of my luminous Ignorance—it shines with an earthy phosphorescence.
When I look at the things I know I get an undetailed perspective of me like a bird’s-eye view of London.
When I look at neat formal rows of things I Don’t Know I have a clear look, as if through an uncurtained window into a bare little room, at my quietest self sitting knitting or plaiting straw. ”

“ Such persons, therefore, find every where a due sense of their claims already established, except among those who are ignorant of the world by virtue of their own obscurity; "Not to know them, argues one's self unknown." ”

“ And outside a snowstorm was beginning.
“The more I thought it over, Kemp, the more I realised what a helpless absurdity an Invisible Man was—in a cold and dirty climate and a crowded civilised city. Before I made this mad experiment I had dreamt of a thousand advantages. That afternoon it seemed all disappointment. I went over the heads of the things a man reckons desirable. No doubt invisibility made it possible to get them, but it made it impossible to enjoy them when they are got. Ambition—what is the good of pride of place when you cannot appear there? ”

“ This latter information I got from the doctor himself, who, along with the rest, was completely and absolutely mystified; as indeed I was myself, for it seemed that there was nothing for it but to accept the fact that some unseen thing - some creature of the invisible world - had actually done a human being nearly to death. ”

“ He dropped into silence, puzzled and in a way awed by the mystery enveloping her—a mystery of aloofness and stoniness, of complete separation from the contact of the world—the mystery that incloses all whose real life is lived deep within themselves. ”

“ But that the unapparent, the unseen and unknown by men is [better] , [15] he says in these words: “An unapparent harmony is better than an apparent.” He thus commends and admires that which is unknown to him before that which is known, and the invisible before that which can be [seen] . ”

“ Those who knew were numbed by the chill shadow of the inevitable, or rendered callous by the knowledge of their helplessness. Those who were deaf and blind groped blissfully on in their lighthearted ignorance. ”

“ For her innocence is folded round with such thick folds of ignorance, till the right way and time for it to accept knowledge, that what is unsuitable is also unintelligible to her; and, if no dark shadow from without be cast on the white page by misconstruction or by foolish mystery and hiding away of it, no hurt will ensue from its passing freely through her hands. ”

“ A new mystery confronts us here, which we shall do well to challenge; for though it reply not, its silence still will extend the field of our conscious ignorance, which is the most fertile of all that our activity knows. ”

“ The important thing for the moment is the accumulation of claims and experiments that go feeling their way farther and farther along all the paths of the unknown. Meanwhile, that one unexpected door which sheds at the back of our old convictions more than one unexpected door, which sheds upon the life and habits of our secret being sufficient light to puzzle us for many a long day. ”

“ Was it possible that the mere sight of a human face, never beheld before, could disturb the whole tenor of my life,—a stranger of whose mind and character I knew nothing, whose very voice I had never heard? ”

“ How vast and powerful are those hidden organs of the Unconscious Personality we can only dimly see. It is through them that Divine revelation is vouchsafed to man. The visions of the mystic, the prophecies of the seer, the inspiration of the sibyl, all come through this Unconscious Soul. It is through this dumb and suppressed Ego that we communicate by telepathy,—that thought is transferred without using the five senses. ”

“ Each one of us dreams of the unknown and the impossible in accordance with his nature. ”

“ It is the unknown that attracts me. I am mentally painting you in all sorts of radiant colors. You defy me to find you. There is nothing so reliable as the unexpected, nothing so desperately uncertain as a thing assured. ”

“ But the fact is that familiarity does blind men to both marvel and mystery. If it did not, the very stones we tread under foot would proclaim their witness to God, and every moment of our own life would call forth adoration of him. ”

“ I have not, I believe, mentioned to you any books except my own; but we have been amused with the Invisible Gentleman. You must swallow one monstrous magical absurdity at the beginning, and the rest will go down glibly—that is, amusing. ”

“ It must be confessed that this mystery, springing from a point where we least expected to come upon the unknown, bears enough within itself to scatter all our convictions. Remember that, since man appeared upon this earth, he has lived among creatures which, from immemorial experience, he thought that he knew as perfectly as he knows an object fashioned by his hands. Out of these creatures he chose the most docile and, as he called them, the most intelligent, attaching in this case to the word intelligence a sense so narrow as to be almost ridiculous. ”

“ I could understand that we should be obliged to do so if there were no similar phenomena outside them; but in the intuition and clairvoyance of nonspiritualistic mediums and particularly in psychometry we obtain communications between one subconsciousness and another and revelations of unknown, forgotten or future incidents which are equally striking, though stripped of the vapid gossip and tedium reminiscences with which we are overwhelmed by defunct persons who are all the more jealous to prove their identity inasmuch as they know that they do not exist. ”

“ Such has been our progress of late years in the art of revealing to the world at large the hidden springs of every action and event around us that a secret is in reality the only thing now impossible. ”