Ignobility

“ I replenish the earth with venomous reptiles, devouring beasts, — with the forms of life, rising from a mollusk up to sinning, sick, and dying man. More subtle than any beast of the field, I claim this deceit as normal, — that non-intelligence matures from an egg, up to what I term Intelligence. Mortals, alias minds, learn from me to claim evil as more real than good, and as eternal. ”

“ The more reasons you give, the more unreasonable the miracle will appear. Through what you say in defence, people are led to think, and as soon as they really think, the miracle is thrown away.
Among the most ignorant nations you will find the most wonders, among the most enlightened, the least. It is with individuals, the same as with nations. Ignorance believes, Intelligence examines and explains.
For about seven months the ark, with its cargo of men, animals and insects, tossed and wandered without rudder or sail upon a boundless sea. ”

“ Inglesant, "but this very ignorance proves that we can know. We are the creatures of this ignorance against which we rebel. From the earliest dawn of existence we have known nothing. How then could we question for a moment? What thought should we have other than this ignorance which we had imbibed from our growth, but for the existence of some divine principle, 'Fons veri lucidus' within us? The Founder of Christianity said, 'The kingdom of God is within you.' We may not only know the truth, but we may live even in this life in the very household and court of God. ”

“ Is this fine quality of the mind destroyed by the development of the brain? As the domain wrested by science from ignorance increases—as island after island and continent after continent are discovered—as star after star and constellation after constellation in the intellectual world burst upon the midnight of ignorance, does the spirituality of the mind grow less and less? Like morality, is it only found in the company of ignorance and superstition? Is the spiritual man honest, kind, candid?—or dishonest, cruel and hypocritical? ”

“ Pondering on the origin of birth and death, the Enlightened One recognized that ignorance was the root of all evil; and these are the links in the development of life, called the twelve nidānas:7
In the beginning there is existence blind and without knowledge; and in this sea of ignorance there are stirrings formative and organizing. From stirrings, formative and organizing, rises awareness or feelings. Feelings beget organisms that live as individual beings. These organisms develop the six fields, that is, the five senses and the mind. ”

“ Yes, fierce and terrible to reflect upon has been the domination of ignorance! The further we examine into the evolution of our species, the more terrible will it show itself to have been. The more fully will it prove beyond all other proofs, our low origin. The lower we proceed in our researches shall we find the suffering it caused of such magnitude and hideousness that it cannot fail to create in our minds firm and lasting resolves not to be drawn, though in never so little a degree, within its deadening circle. ”

“ Ignorance personifies an Element. Knowledge sees a Being whose material expression is an Element. Ignorance sees the physical. Knowledge sees in everything physical a manifestation of the One Self, showing Himself in a limited form for the helping of His world. And so the higher Occultist may address Agni, the Ḍevarāja of Fire, and, below Agni, countless hosts of those who are called Fire Ḍevas, or Fire Elementals, all expressions of his nature, all using a special type of matter in the world. ”

“ Imagine that even after primitive ignorance had created the supernatural, it had come to an abrupt stop when man had emerged from the purely savage stage. Suppose a generation born, not without knowledge of what their progenitors believed, but with a sufficient knowledge of their own to correct their ancestor's errors. Suppose that generation in a position to recognise disease, insanity, delusion, hysteria, hallucination for what they are. Assume them to be under no delusion concerning the nature of man, physically or mentally. ”

“ When the evidence lies all around us as thick as the fallen leaves of autumn, clustering on the pages of history, and proclaimed by every principle of mental science, that what is called conversion is nothing but a mental and temperamental or nervous phenomenon—a psychological process—how can we rank those amongst intelligent people who still claim it to be "the power of God operating upon the soul of the sinner"? Ignorance is the only plea that can acquit them of the charge of imbecility. ”

“ The only method of abating this power of Ignorance, is by increasing that of Knowledge. As the sun goes up the sky, the darkness disappears; and the owl, the bat, and the beasts of prey, slink out of sight. Give the people knowledge,—give them better education,—and thus, crime will be abated,—drunkenness, improvidence, lawlessness, and all the powers of evil, will, to a certain extent, disappear. ”

“ They refused to accept for a moment that there could be found one ignoble thought in all the world. They crawled and climbed and scrambled over high ethical plateaus and ranges, or drowned themselves in metaphysical seas of sentimentality. ”

“ It had geologists and astronomers of its own who constructed the earth and the constellations in accordance with the Bible. With sword and flame it destroyed the brave and thoughtful men who told the truth. It was the enemy of investigation and of reason. Faith and fiction were in partnership.
To-day the intelligence of the world denies the miraculous. Ignorance is the soil of the supernatural. The foundation of Christianity has crumbled, has disappeared, and the entire fabric must fall. The natural is true. The miraculous is false. ”

“ This process of higher understanding improves mortal mind until error disappears, and nothing is left which deserves to perish or be punished.
Ignorance, like intentional wrong, is not Science. Ignorance must be seen and corrected before we can attain harmony. Inharmonious beliefs, which rob Mind, calling it matter, and deify their own notions, imprison Ignorance. ”

“ If he knew them, we may infer from his silence that his narrative was not open to those contradictions; in other words, that the deluge of which he speaks was not universal. If he did not know them, his ignorance points to the same conclusion: otherwise, we shall have a divine miracle, intended for the warning and the benefit of the human race, yet so contrived that all its most surprising circumstances should be absolutely unknown to one half of mankind, and as absolutely incredible to the other half. ”

“ Is there any evidence that human beings can be infected or wrought upon by poisons, or otherwise, so that they shall manifest any of the peculiarities belonging to beings of a lower nature? Can such peculiarities—be transmitted by inheritance? Is there anything to countenance the stories, long and widely current, about the “evil eye”? or is it a mere fancy that such a power belongs to any human being? Have you any personal experience as to the power of fascination said to be exercised by certain animals? ”

“ And then this man, in learning the value of Ignorance, came perilously near believing that no man could know anything. He came dangerously near the belief that Knowledge is all a mirage toward which men journey hopelessly; a phantom to be grasped by no hand; a will-o'-the-wisp to be followed here and there but leading nowhere. He, for a little, said that Ignorance is the truest wisdom. ”

“ I believe that the solution of these fundamental questions still lies as yet beyond the limits of our knowledge of nature, and that we shall be obliged, for a long time yet to come, to content ourselves with an "Ignoramus"—if not even with an "Ignorabimus." ”

“ Ignorance inevitably led to error, and false views to false practices. In the sympathetic environment thus developed, the occultist flourished and displayed the impressive insignia of exclusive wisdom. His attitude was that of one seeking to solve an enigma, to find the key to a secret arcanum ”

“ Every law of nature that has been so far discovered by Science has been discovered by experience which has turned ignorance into knowledge. Take Roger Bacon, one of the early chemists in the days when to investigate was heresy, in the days when to understand was crime. ”

“ Its gates are guarded by Ignorance, and to pass them we have to surrender all that in our nature is most divine. It is enough that our fathers believed. They have exhausted the faith-faculty of the species. ”

“ When we shall be ingenuous with ourselves, we shall be obliged to agree that it was uniformly the ignorance in which our ancestors were involved, their want of knowledge of natural causes, their unenlightened ideas on the powers of nature, which gave birth to the gods they worshipped ”

“ For six days earth was made by the shrinkage of these intellectual powers, usually called creation, and on the seventh day they were completely bounded from all visionary life, and they rested in that hope which a literature, more modern than Blake's, has called Agnosticism. This is the story of the creation of the delusion called Nature, not of Creation in the full sense of the term. For Creation produced the means by which that delusion was able to delude, and also our escape by death from its power. ”

“ Methinks there is equal need of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Ignorance, what we will call Beautiful Knowledge, a knowledge useful in a higher sense: for what is most of our boasted so-called knowledge but a conceit that we know something, which robs us of the advantage of our actual ignorance? What we call knowledge is often our positive ignorance ”

“ Another antagonistic and opposite principle had to be found, adequate to resist the baneful agency of ignorance and stem its sad and misfortune-creating influence. That principle is science or knowledge. Ignorance is but a negative agent: it is only the absence of science. Let knowledge be, and ignorance shall vanish away in the same manner as darkness is noiselessly but irresistibly dissipated by the presence of light. ”

“ Ignorance, the essence of which consists in believing in the distinction between subject and object, is also called defilement and the highest truth passes through various stages of defilement ending with that where under the influence of egoism and passion the external world of particulars is believed to be everything. ”

“ We must examine and fix what ignorance is—what we are, and can be, ignorant of. And thus we are thrown upon an entirely new research, constituting an intermediate section of philosophy which we term the Agnoiology, or theory of ignorance (λόγος τῆς ἀγνοίας) —the theory of true ignorance) . The result of this research is given out in its proper place in these Institutes.
Now we can settle the problem of ontology—and how.§ 60. Now our course is pretty dear, and our way made straight before us. The epistemology has fixed what alone any intelligence can know. ”

“ These men who knew the value of Ignorance kept the spark of her faith in men alive. The faith, without which her dreams would be idle dreams, impossible of fulfillment, was kept for her by those men who knew the value of Ignorance. ”

“ During these years of persecution, ignorance, superstition and slavery, nearly all the people, the kings, lawyers, doctors, the learned and the unlearned, believed in that frightful production of ignorance, fear, and faith, called witchcraft. They believed that man was the sport and prey of devils. They really thought that the very air was thick with these enemies of man. With few exceptions, this hideous and infamous belief was universal. Under these conditions, progress was almost impossible. ”

“ Perhaps they were known to have been of ignoble origin; for, in the course of one of his most philosophical treatises, he bursts into an extraordinary ebullition of ferocity against such as adduce a knowledge of that kind as an argument against a family's acquired nobility; affirming that such brutal stuff should be answered not with words, but with the dagger. ”

“ Agreeing as I cordially do with his wish, that neither superstition, affectation, whatever that may mean, idle curiosity, or avarice, were the motives which actuate those who molest the relics of the dead, I cannot allow that neither dust and ashes, bones, nor teeth, have any intelligence to give us; nor yet that by the reverential scrutiny of those relics the living can be neither benefited nor improved. ”

“ As the anomalies and apparently useless and accidental features in the human or in other animal organisms may be explained as stunted or rudimentary survivals of organs useful in a previous stage of life, so the anomalous and irrational myths of civilised races may be explained as survivals of stories which, in an earlier state of thought and knowledge, seemed natural enough. ”

“ This fact of the personification of the objects of perception is therefore evident and constant in the primitive man of civilized races, in the barbarous condition of modern savages, in the ignorant multitude, and in children—intellectual conditions which approach most closely to the condition of animals—and conversely it is plain that it belongs in the highest degree to the intellectual life of animals, and that myth, into which such a personification and animation of things must be resolved, has its original and innate necessity in animal life. ”

“ But our experiences will reveal fully the inevitable persecutions, false accusations, unworthy students, etc., that hinder the footsteps of science; " “our heritage is unto us as a speckled bird; and birds round about would devour us.” When we became as it were an involuntary detective, the good drawn to us and the evil repelled, we took this loving hint from our Father to work out a rule for understanding individual character, the evil of which was at first well-nigh hidden from us, and now recognize the hand that has bestowed all these experiences. ”