Immutable

“ Ours is an immutable reality which should make you shudder when you approach us if you are really conscious of the fact that your reality is a mere transitory and fleeting illusion, taking this form today and that tomorrow, according to the conditions, according to your will, your sentiments, which in turn are controlled by an intellect that shows them to you today in one manner and tomorrow ... ”

“ For that which is itself especially immutable, immaterial, and entirely pure, is accustomed to apprehend the future; but that which is mingled with the most irrational and dark nature of a corporeal-formed and material essence is filled with abundant ignorance. ”

“ This will appear plain if we consider that, whatever is immutable cannot be acted upon by any higher power; for the action of such a superior cause supposes a corresponding effect and that effect supposes a change in the object acted upon, in one way or another; and, consequently, any object upon which an effect can be produced, must be a mutable or changeable object. ”

“ They then cease to be subject to mutation,—Mind being immutable,—and persist in eternal blessedness and love. For such favoured ones of heaven, the greatest evils of this life are converted into goods, correspondingly great. ”

“ God helps only those who try to help themselves. He governs humanity by immutable laws which the prayers of a world cannot change. Let this call from the chief citizen of the Republic to national consecration persuade us all to study the divine law of American civilization; the extent of our departure from it; the obligation to obey it more faithfully in the days to come. ”

“ That immutability, which constitutes the perfection of what we (from the poverty of language) term the divine mind, would inevitably be the bane of creatures liable to error; it is of the constancy, rather than of the fickleness, of human beings, that we have reason to complain. ”

“ What one misfortune or disaster in the book of embryotic evils, that could unmechanize thy frame, or entangle thy filaments! which has not fallen upon thy head, or ever thou camest into the world—what evils in thy passage into it!—What evils since!—produced into being, in the decline of thy father's days—when the powers of his imagination and of his body were waxing feeble—when radical heat and radical moisture, the elements which should have temper'd thine, were drying up ”

“ But the lowest and the deepest of its intonations reached the most distant ear, and no one who heard was left to doubt its meaning.
“Mutiny!” he said, in a tone that strangely balanced between irony and scorn; “open, violent, and blood-seeking mutiny! Are ye tired of your lives, my men? Is there one, among ye all, who is willing to make himself an example for the good of the rest? If there be, let him lift a hand, a finger, a hair: Let him speak, look me in the eye, or dare to show that life is in him, by sign, breath, or motion!” ”

“ Take an old man's word; there's nothing worse than a muddle in all the world. It is easy to face Death and Fate, and the things that sound so dreadful. It is on my muddles that I look back with horror—on the things that I might have avoided. We can help one another but little. I used to think I could teach young people the whole of life, but I know better now, and all my teaching of George has come down to this: beware of muddle. ”

“ It is impossible to explain in words, or to cause to be understood by the understanding, what variety of impurity is caused in the soul by a variety of desires. For, if it could be expressed and understood, it would be a wondrous thing, and one also which would fill us with pity, to see how each desire, in accordance with its quality and degree, be it greater or smaller, leaves in the soul its mark and deposit of impurity and vileness, and how one single disorder of the reason can be the source of innumerable different impurities, some greater, some less, each one after its kind. ”

“ The following passage from Amiel (p. 44 of English edition) is an admirable commentary on the mystical doctrine of immanence:—"The centre of life is neither in thought nor in feeling nor in will, nor even in consciousness, so far as it thinks, feels, or wishes. For moral truth may have been penetrated and possessed in all these ways, and escape us still. Deeper even than consciousness, there is our being itself, our very substance, our nature. ”

“ Can the illusion of immovability be long defended from what is quietly passed through and gone beyond?
Forget not, when you feel the need arise to be defensive about anything, you have identified yourself with an illusion. And therefore feel that you are weak because you are alone. ”

“ Mutability to such a vision, is as the eddy that spirit maketh around its own self-circling agency, revealing alike in the smallest ripple and the mightiest surges the power that stirreth at the centre. ”

“ At these desolating words, Immalee, who had in vain looked to any of these systems for that hope or solace which her pure spirit and vivid imagination alike thirsted for, felt a recoiling of the soul unutterable at religion thus painted to her, and exhibiting only a frightful picture of blood and cruelty, of the inversion of every principle of nature, and the disruption of every tie of the heart. ”

“ Which in our own or was or should have been!
Yet, yet, recal the mind that you had then,
And, so recalling, listen yet again;
If you escaped, ’tis plainly understood
Impunity may leave a culprit good ”

“ If the formal impulsion becomes receptive, that is, if thought anticipates sensation, and the person substitutes itself in the place of the world, it loses as a subject and autonomous force what it gains as object, because immutability implies change, and that to manifest itself also absolute reality requires limits. As soon as man is only form, he has no form, and the personality vanishes with the condition. In a word, it is only inasmuch as he is spontaneous, autonomous, that there is reality out of him, that he is also receptive ”

“ And I thought any man who had tact enough for that would be my undoing and I should not wonder,” with a swift look from under her long lashes, “if it were true, but you will never tell a soul I told you, will you?” beseechingly. “It’s a secret—the undoing, you know.” ”

“ Practically I thought I had impunity to do whatever I chose, everything—save to give away my secret. So I thought. Whatever I did, whatever the consequences might be, was nothing to me. I had merely to fling aside my garments and vanish. No person could hold me. ”

“ The sad side of impecuniosity is, unfortunately, so vast a subject that it would require an entire volume, instead of part of a chapter, to properly record the miseries of mind and body endured by those in past ages, who, not unknown to fame, have been permitted to pine and die in despair. ”

“ My fate is uniform: the demon that controlled me at first is still in the fruition of power; I am entangled in his fold, and every effort that I make to escape only involves me in deeper ruin. I need not conceal, for all the consequences of disclosure are already experienced: I cannot endure a groundless imputation, though to free me from it I must create and justify imputations still more atrocious. ”

“ Impudence, too, has its grades and degrees—its ancient types and its more modern ones—but as they all veil their brassy splendors, merging their separate rays in the central effulgence of our spiritual Colossus, we shall waive their particular enumeration in favor of the individualised impersonation of them all. ”

“ To contemplate one's self therein is by no means a tribute to vanity; on the contrary, it is conducive to serious thoughts upon the precariousness of human existence, so green, distorted, and scarred is the reflection that meets the eye. ”

“ It is frequently averred nowadays that much that is written bears evidence of being of a non-practical character, and under these circumstances, I felt I should take a pardonable pride in being able to point to one volume in the English language to which this stigma could not be applied; for I flatter myself the subject of Impecuniosity is one with which I have long—too long—been practically familiar. ”

“ And how all thought of fixity in anything had disappeared as a ridiculous illusion intended, maybe, by something to fool man into the belief that his world here, his physical and mental state, was real and enduring, a greater thing than anything else in the universe, when so plainly it was not. ”

“ I seem to be in a chronic state of utter indifference. I continue to live in the world, but, for all practical purposes, the world for me has ceased to exist. Everything, big and little, that other people are doing, seems to me silly and futile. ”

“ The idea of immanence comes to have a magical sound; everything which oversteps the boundary marked out by the work of the world soon comes to be regarded as a flight into a realm of shadows, into an “other” world. ”

“ There are certain hopes akin to the child's soap-bubble which we cherish insensibly, admiring their airy grace and radiant colouring, almost persuading ourselves of their reality, till we apply to them some practical test—then behold! at a touch, the bubble bursts, the dream vanishes, to leave us only a vague sense of injustice, an uncomfortable consciousness of disappointment and disgust. ”

“ They charge us with Immodesty in neglecting the Guidance of wiser and more discerning Men, than our selves. But is not this rather the greatest Sign of Modesty, to confess, that, we our selves may err, and all Mankind besides? To acknowledge the Difficulties of Science; and to submit our Minds to all the least Works of Nature? ”

“ It is the form which changes, not the essence. The few great underlying elements from which character and happiness are evolved are permanent—their mutations are endless. Dull-minded, we take the mutations to mean shifting of principle. ”

“ Impudence itself cannot reclaim her. If I write miserable, she reckons me among the children of perdition, and discards me her region: If I assume the gross and substantial, she plays the real ghost with me, and vanishes in a moment. I had hopes in the hypocrisy of the sex; but perseverance makes it as bad as a fixed aversion. ”

“ Shewing that all the mutability of our tempers, the disorders of our passions, the corruption of our hearts, all the reveries of the imagination, all the contradictions and absurdities that are to be found in human life, and human opinions, are in effect the mutability, disorders, corruption, and absurdities of human reason. ”

“ The doors of the soul were unlocked and the past thought-images, with their mental impressions, were thrown open to view. How can a Muteite deny the crime which is photographed on the sensitive living plates of his own mind! ”

“ The peril of impurity lies in the insidiousness of the poison. Just one taint of impurity, one glance at a lewd picture, one hearing of an unclean story may begin the fatal corruption of mind and heart. ”

“ Well, then—however telling it may be to hurrah for bubbles, and to call your wife a bubble, and your child another; because the world is all a 'fleeting show,' and bubbles are a 'fleeting show;' or because the Scriptures tell us that everything here is emptiness and vanity—and bubbles are emptiness and vanity ”

“ They sat through a long stillness.
"It is well to come here," he said at last. "We stop—our minds are very finite. After all we are just poor animals rising out of the brute, each with a mind, the poor beginning of a mind. We are so stupid. ”

“ In the present day we are too apt to regard the doctrine of transmutation, which formed the basis of alchemy, as a mere hallucination of the human mind; and to look upon the men who entertained it with mixed feelings of pity and contempt. ”

“ Men in a hurry tumbled over me, rude boys threatened to swallow me, dirty-faced and ragged children of my own age eyed me in mute surprise, that almost equaled mine, or with precocious malignity and a jealousy that, I trust, did not ripen in them, plucked my clothes or my hair, or threw mud on me. ”

“ I resemble, I give you fair warning, neither the poet, Moser-Hartmann, nor the cardinal legate, nor many others, they say you have bewitched; in truth, your impudence would seem to be more like a dream or nightmare than reality. ”

“ When that which clings falls off, severed is being's tie;
All else will then be seen as instability.
At the moment in which desire has been abandoned, (other) births will be cut off; when that has not been done, instability will be seen. ”

“ Polwarth, a strange and very uncomfortable doubt has rushed in upon me, and I find myself altogether unfit to tackle it. I have no weapons—not a single argument of the least weight. I wonder if it be a law of nature that no sooner shall a man get into a muddle with one thing, than a thousand other muddles shall come pouring in upon him, as if Muddle itself were going to swallow him up! ”

“ But that little is quite sufficient to dispose of the theory of pure imposture. On the other hand, there is nothing spiritual and nothing very human in the pranks played by or in the presence of the mediums. ”

“ Sludge, 'the Medium,'" said to be a satire upon the great Scottish spiritualist and humbug, Home, shows us another kind of quackery; a man who lives by imposture explains to us how he can practise imposture with a good moral conscience, and under the belief that imposture is a benefit to mankind. ”

“ Shall I say—to show the extent of the evil—that they are sometimes heard from both parents? Now no serious observer of human life and conduct can doubt that by every species of impure language, whether in the form of hints, innuendoes, double entendres, or plainer speech, impure thoughts are awakened, a licentious imagination inflamed, and licentious purposes formed, which would otherwise never have existed. ”

“ Immovability His Keynote
¶ The keynote of the bony man's whole nature—mental, physical and moral—is immovability. [Pg 182]
Once he settles into a place of any kind—a town, a home, or even a chair—he is disinclined to move. He does not settle as quickly as other types but when he does it is for a longer stay. ”

“ If you ever scratched those pretty hands of yours getting a glow-worm out of a hedge, you know that, when you have brought it home, you wondered why you had given yourself so much inconvenience to acquire the little impostor. Possession strains—it depresseth her that gives, and him that takes. ”