Unst

“ Now that so many and so important properties of each have been discovered, whereby a strange plurality, as ineffable as it is inevitable, is proved to exist in the supreme unity, I think it most interesting to reflect, again and again, upon so unfathomable a mystery. ”

“ In truth they were bound together by many a strong tie, and above all by one of a polemical kind, namely, by the aversion for the monotony that had preceded them, and by the struggle against merely dogmatic rules. Unbending uniformity is death! Let us be various and individual as life itself is. ”

“ As we follow the chain through this last region of disease, misery, and sin, of embodied Discord, and feel, as we must, in the mutilated affinities of its revolting forms, their fearful relation to this fair, harmonious creation,--how does the awful fact, in these its breathing fragments, speak to us of a fallen world!
As the living centre of this stupendous circle stands the Soul of Man; the conscious Reality, to which the vast inclosure is but the symbol. ”

“ Centre.—The feeling, “I am the centre of the world,” forcibly comes to us when we are unexpectedly overtaken by disgrace: we then feel as if we were standing dazed in the midst of a surge, and dazzled by the glance of one enormous eye which gazes down upon us from all sides and looks us through and through. ”

“ As for what thou sayest, that inward thought and outward act should go together in the service of God and man, that is a verity, and often have I heard the saying from the great Hillel—may his memory be for a blessing! But if outward act may be clean when inward thought may be unclean, how, on the other hand, can we know the purity of what is within, except it be decided by the cleanliness of what is without? ”

“ Father, says he, keep them in thy name, that they may be one, like as we are! Observe, I beseech you, what a wonderful union Christ requires in his followers; he does not pray that they may be of one mind, but that they may be one; nor does he mention this union in a vague manner, but says, "That they may be one, as we are," who are one and the same in a most perfect, yet unspeakable and inexplicable manner. ”

“ We may, then, add to our experience on the assumption of a uniformity in nature; we may fill in our picture of what is and has been, as experience gives it us, in such a way as to make the whole consistent with this uniformity. ”

“ Now, as it was plain to my father, that all souls were by nature equal,——and that the great difference between the most acute and the most obtuse understanding——was from no original sharpness or bluntness of one thinking substance above or below another,——but arose merely from the lucky or unlucky organisation of the body, in that part where the soul principally took up her residence,——he had made it the subject of his enquiry to find out the identical place. ”

“ When the first state is passed through, which is the state of the exteriors treated of in the preceding chapter, the man-spirit is let into the state of his interiors, or into the state of his interior will and the thought thence proceeding, in which he had been in the world, when, being left to himself, he thought freely and without restraint. ”

“ And who shall determine the limits of the unconscious life which in that lonely contemplation or that lonelier scorn, the soul receives from the State? For from the same source the component and the composite, the constituent and the constituted unity alike arise, and the Immanence that is in each is One. ”

“ Like many young men of virtuous life and ascetic habit, Uniacke was disposed to worship that which was uncompromising in human nature, the slight hardness which sometimes lurks, like a kernel, in the saint. ”

“ And we understand by the Center in itself, with the aspiring Wrathfulness, with the wrathful Will to Nature, the dark World, and with the Egress out of itself to Manifestation, the outward World; and with the second Will out of the first, which enters again into the Liberty, we understand the Light World, or the Kingdom of Joy, or the true Deity. ”

“ Herein lies the truth, that the essence and Being of Things cannot be opposed to the essence and Being of Spirit, as though the former were a second principal division of the world and a perfect stranger to the latter. ”

“ I mean that Unity of Spirit—in itself a fountain of strength—which, filling the people of the North, shall make them tread under foot past antipathies, decayed dissensions, and those irritating names which now exist only as tattered ensigns of ancient strife. ”

“ We trust that this lesson may have brought to your minds the realization of the Oneness of All—the fact that we are all parts of the one encircling unity, the heart-throbs and pulsations of which are to be felt even to the outer edge of the circle of life—in Man, in Monad, in Crystal, in Atom. ”

“ A thousand voices of those without have loudly called to those within, and asked their questions as to the eternal ‘Where?’ But they have received no answer, only the hollow echo of their own question, as if they had shouted into an empty vault. ”

“ Such objections as these must, I think, arise in the mind of every one who ponders, for the first time, upon the conception of a single physical basis of life underlying all the diversities of vital existence; but I propose to demonstrate to you that, notwithstanding these apparent difficulties, a threefold unity—namely, a unity of power, or faculty, a unity of form, and a unity of substantial composition—does pervade the whole living world. ”

“ Thou dost well to wish thyself within the limits of a common station, for what station that required soul and resolution couldst thou rightly fill? Give a soldier, a statesman, a divine, thy sentiments, and as justly will he fret himself about the miseries of his condition. ”

“ If we are materialists because we do not admit the existence of a unit-faculty of the soul, but recognise several primitive faculties, we ask whether the ordinary division of the faculties of the soul into understanding, will, attention, memory, judgment, imagination, and [67] affections and passions, expresses nothing more than a primitive unit-faculty? ”

“ And as body and soul are united by correspondence, the one being filled, pervaded, and animated by the other, so the literal and spiritual senses of the Word are united in like manner,—the former being the appropriate receptacle or Divine medium of the latter. ”

“ This kind of introversion is very easy and advances the soul naturally, and without effort, because God is our centre. The centre always exerts a very powerful attractive virtue; and the more spiritual and exalted it is, the more violent and irresistible are its attractions.
3. But besides the attracting virtue of the centre, there is, in every creature, a strong tendency to reunion with its centre, which is vigorous and active in proportion to the spirituality and perfection of the subject. ”

“ But if, on the other hand, it be said that our character is not the mere fruit of our antecedents and surroundings, the law of uniformity is clearly broken. A new element has come into the world, namely, my character, which has not come out of the antecedents and surroundings according to any fixed law. ”

“ Therefore, no sooner do we find in past history an institution, a custom, a law or a belief a little different from those with which we are familiar, than we immediately search for some complex meanings, which frequently resolve themselves into phrases of doubtful significance. ”

“ Each student adheres, by temperament and by habit, to the first or to the second of these gods of the mind. By religion, he tends to unity; by intellect, or by the senses, to the many. A too rapid unification, and an excessive appliance to parts and particulars, are the twin dangers of speculation. ”

“ It remains for us to trace, by what dim light of custom and tradition we may, the faint trail of those momentous footprints, which, however lame and halting, took the strait and difficult way to a higher life. ”

“ That the Inner State affects the Outer Form is a fact generally acknowledged by men, for it is in strict accordance with the general experience of the race. We know that certain mental states will result in imparting to the countenance certain lines and expressions appropriate thereto; certain peculiarities of carriage and manner, voice and demeanor. The facial characteristics, manner, walk, voice and gestures of the miser will be recognized as entirely different from that of the generous person; those of the coward differ materially from those of the brave man ”

“ For where an indivisible unity, like the God of the metaphysician, or the blank forms of consciousness, is the first degree or term, it is plain that it can correspond to nothing distinct in the second sphere, or the region of causes, and to nothing really various in the third, or the region of effects. ”

“ The third division of the spiritual body is the fine film of subtle matter that separates off the individual Spirit as a Being, and yet permits the interpenetration of all by all, and is thus the expression of the fundamental unity. ”

“ Whichever groups of sensations within a soul awaken most readily, begin to speak, and give the word of command—these decide as to the general order of rank of its values, and determine ultimately its list of desirable things. ”

“ In these pantheistic sympathies I dimly recall that another sect finds three great mysteries in its esoteric view of the world. The wind whistling through the trees, the river breaking over its rocks, the movements of man and his voice,—or, indeed, his silence,—are the expression of the great mysteries of body, of word, and of thought. ”

“ When, for example, we say that the union, in our own constitution, of body and mind is perfectly mysterious, what do we really mean? Simply, that in the properties of body there is nothing which would lead us, antecedently, to expect any combination with the properties of mind; that we might have entertained for ever the notions of solidity, extension, colour, organization, without the remotest suspicion of such things as sensation, thought, volition, affection, being associated with them. ”

“ Omanos Fûnha̤, thou art favored beyond all men who ever have lived on Ento, for even in the hour of thy deepest anguish a joy hath come to thee, which henceforth shall fill thy days with blessedness and peace. Then hasten, oh, hasten to crown the days of the children of Ento with unlooked for gladness. Give to them the assurance that the old, hopeless faith is no more. ”

“ Fish and the Misses Fox be prevailed on to make us a visit? The fact is, Gray, we Michiganders are wofully benighted upon Spiritual subjects. Everything pertaining to ‘the world, the flesh, and the devil’ we understand perfectly; but when it comes to getting communications from the other world direct, and seeing with our eyes, we ‘knock under.’ Our press, too, is anything but free upon these subjects, giving only one side, and concluding with the small bill of The Herald, that [241] there are no more things in Heaven and earth than are dreamed of in their philosophy.”—Detroit Correspondent. ”

“ When he stopped to take breath, I interposed, that, "whilst I highly valued all his explanations, I was bound to tell him that I was born and bred a Unitarian." "Yes," he said, "I supposed so;" and continued as before. ”

“ There is, however, a reaction of the Outer upon the Inner, which while equally true is not so generally recognized nor admitted, and we think it well to briefly call your attention to the same, for the reason that this correspondence between the Inner and the Outer—this reaction as well as the action—must be appreciated in order that the entire meaning and content of the subject of Human Nature may be fully grasped. ”

“ At present, More’s most intimate associates stood in the very forefront of the most advanced school, and his “Utopia” was to make his position beside them as conspicuous to the world as it was assured in fact. ”

“ Metaphorically, but only metaphorically, we speak of the sub-conscious as a vast zone, an indefinable margin, surrounding the narrow focus of attention, and we may {xxix} figuratively, but only figuratively, call it the subliminal "region" where all our life-gains, and often the gains of the race, are garnered. ”

“ Thus our world, however many and various its objects, possesses what we may call Ontological Unity, in so far as all its types of Being, concrete and abstract, appear as various aspects of one type of Being. Nor can you sunder any single idea of an isolated real object from the network established by ideas of reality in general. The whole of this world stands or falls together. ”

“ I interrupted, eager to be done with this inquisition, and for the first time I saw an actual break of something human in that stern face of hers, for she started as if curious to learn what other motives might bring men from that thousands-of-miles-distant civilization to such an unknown land as this. ”

“ It is this emphasis by Hus of the great modern idea that the foundations of truth lie, not so much in unreasoning authority, as in the appeal which it makes to man’s consciousness and conscience—the two are often one—that gives to the last letters of Hus their undying value, and marks at the same time the rise of a new age. ”

“ We are thus led, almost inevitably, to the idea of a plurality of worlds; and the conclusion is forced upon us, that the spot which the Creator has assigned to us is but a humble province in his boundless empire. ”

“ Willets, Post, Granger, and others. The Spirits fulfilled their promises admirably. We decided to leave the entire movement to their direction. We felt powerless to act on our own judgment. We met at the house of Mr. Isaac Post to talk over the matter, and learn all we could in regard to this great step forced upon us in a way so contrary to our own wishes. We had not been long in the parlor before the alphabet was called and spelled, “Amy, thee must invite sixteen persons to come here on Saturday evening, to hear the Spirit rappings.” ”