Incognito

“ Ignorance of this kind exalts our opinion of the unseen and unknown artist’s skill, if he be unseen and unknown, but raises no doubts in our minds of the existence and agency of such an artist, at some former time, and in some place or other. Nor can I perceive that it varies at all, the inference, whether the question arise concerning a human agent, or concerning an agent of a different species, or an agent possessing, in some respects, a different nature. ”

“ In the case of the combination marked by the first, namely, the thing and its presence, the thing is the prominent part, and the presence generally escapes attention. In the case of the second, the thing and its absence, the absence is the important part, and the thing is feebly, if at all, attended to.
Ignorance is easily explained, in the same manner. Knowledge is the name of a certain well-known something, as present or existent. Ignorance is the name of the same well-known something, as absent or nonexistent.
Having a sensation, or an idea, is one state of consciousness ”

“ 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. ”

“ Some witness had a conversation with somebody, three years ago, four years ago, or five years ago. The unsafest and the most unsatisfactory evidence in this world is evidence of conversation. Words leave no trace. They leave no scar in the air, no footsteps. Memory writes upon the secret tablet of the brain words that no human eye can see. No man can look into the brain of another and tell whether he is giving a true transcript of what is there. It is absolutely impossible for you to tell whether it is memory or imagination. ”

“ Making the largest allowance for fraud, self-deception, and all the vagaries of the imagination, no intelligent individual, familiar with the phenomena, will attempt to deny the extension of man’s psychic world of consciousness and the manifestation of intelligence in ways and under conditions previously unknown. ”

“ I tell you, the ignoble intellect cannot think the truth, even within its own limits, and when it seriously tries! And of the ignoble intellect that does not seriously try, and has even reached the "ignobleness" of seriously trying the reverse, and of lying with its very tongue, what are we to expect? It is frightful to consider. ”

“ It will be seen, then, how marvellously the action of certain senses may be exalted by long and careful training on the one hand, and suddenly by disease on the other. We have seen, moreover, how some persons known as sensitives are able to receive impressions by thought-transference so as to name cards, repeat words and fictitious names, both of persons and places, merely thought of but not spoken by another person known as the agent or operator, and to draw diagrams unmistakably like those formed in the mind or intently looked upon by the agent. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Psychic phenomena transform and otherwise modify speech; and these phenomena are as active to-day as ever. Ceaselessly, intelligence and ignorance work side by side as a team in the modifying of our tongue. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, and quite paradoxically, they shape it into an engine more and more capable for its purposes. Ignorance and Wisdom are the two gods of destiny. The collective human will, a vast underlying, impersonal power, is a potent factor in this process: a factor that has been ignored and even denied by students of speech. ”

“ But, alas, my head soon runs itself against the wall of mystery. Not only are there things it does not know, but there are things which it knows for a certainty that it will never be able to know. How can a man jump off his own shadow, or stand on his own shoulders, to look over the impassable wall? That all which is intelligible to us is real, I grant; but is all that is real intelligible to us? And then what becomes my knowledge save a melancholy feeling of ignorance that knows itself to be such? The same contradiction in my faculty for enjoyment. ”

“ In his Yesterdays, the ignorance of his little girl mate was an anchor that held the boy from drifting too far in the current of evil. In his Yesterdays, the goodness and wisdom of his father was not a will-o'-the-wisp but, to the boy, a steady guiding light. What mattered, then, if the knowledge of the old negro was but a foolish mirage? What mattered if the hired man did not know about fairies or if he did know so many things that were not so? So it was that the man came to know the value of Ignorance. So it was that the man did not fall into the pit of saying: "There is only Ignorance." ”

“ 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. ”

“ Again, before we can even desire to eat of the tree of knowledge, we must be ignorant; and thus we see our ignorance itself to be a needed stage in our upward evolution. We see in a glass darkly; we must become fools that we may be wise. In our imperfect condition we do but catch brief glimpses and fleeting shadows of the one mighty Truth. Just as our nervous system must waste that it may be nourished, as the pendulum must fall on the one side that it may rise on the other, [1] so must our ignorance precede our half-knowledge, and our half-knowledge precede the fuller revelation. ”

“ If we reject the evidence of hysterical phenomena, of that furnished by a coconscious personality, and by automatic script and speech, etc., we shall have to reject precisely similar evidence for consciousness in other people than ourselves. ”

“ 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." ”

“ If the results of the understanding go by the name of knowledge, then the higher teaching of the intellectual intuition may be called ignorance—ignorance, however, that is conscious of itself, docta ignorantia. ”

“ Ignorance and credulity go hand in hand. Intelligence understands something of the law of average, has an idea of probability. It is not swayed by prejudice, neither is it driven to extremes by suspicion. It takes into consideration personal motives. It examines the character of the witnesses, makes allowance for the ignorance of the time,—for enthusiasm, for fear,—and comes to its conclusion without fear and without passion.
What knowledge has the Christian of another world? The senses of the Christian are the same as those of the Agnostic. ”

“ But here also too great analysis, a too curious probing of motives and processes and alternatives and possibilities hurts rather than helps. The pure thinker is too often apt to cry out with Goethe’s horror: ‘There is nothing more frightful than active ignorance.’ [100] Yet nine tenths of the work of the world is done, sometimes efficiently, sometimes haltingly, but done, by active ignorance, and could not be done otherwise. The thinker, the profound analyst, debates, hesitates, falters, and too often accomplishes nothing. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ The objects now concretely acknowledged are related to the objects not now concretely known, in precisely the same general sense as is that in which, at any instant of our conscious life, the objects which our attention focusses are related to what, although present, is lost in the background of consciousness. Ignorance always means inattention to details. ”

“ This their doubting is not to be taken ill, because it proceedeth from ignorance, but not from envy. On the contrary, there is another sort of perverse men, who being puffed up with their own putatitious knowledge, despise unknown things, not out of simplicity or ignorance, but out of a meer diabolical envy to those who have a greater knowledge and experience of things than themselves. ”

“ In discussing such matters as these, where our knowledge and our ignorance are so curiously blended together, and where it is so difficult to make men feel that so much ignorance can lie so close to so much knowledge;—to make them believe that they have been allowed to discover so much, and yet are not allowed to discover more:—we may be permitted to illustrate our meaning, by supposing a case of blended knowledge and ignorance, of real and imaginary discovery. ”

“ In consequence of this mistake, the neglect, viz., to discriminate between cognitions and mere elements of cognition, the psychology of innate ideas has come to us in a very crude state, in a very imperfect and untenable form, a form which was sure to provoke, and which did provoke, a reaction in favour of the other extreme, I mean the psychology of sensation. The advocates of innate ideas were held to have magnified to an undue extent the inborn principles of knowledge, to have multiplied without careful investigation the native properties of the mind ”

“ Thus, to recognize a man by certain marks of gesture and manner as a military man or a Frenchman, though popularly called a perception, is much more of an unfolded process of conscious inference. And what applies to specific recognition applies still more forcibly to individual recognition, which is often a matter of very delicate conscious comparison and judgment. To say where the line should be drawn here between perception and observation on the one hand, and inference on the other, is clearly impossible. ”

“ It might at first seem as if perception, introspection, and memory must exhaust all that is meant by immediate, or self-evident, knowledge, and as if what I have here called belief must be uniformly mediate, derivate, or inferred knowledge. The apprehension of something now present to the mind, externally or internally, and the reapprehension through the process of memory of what was once so apprehended, might appear to be the whole of what can by any stretch of language be called direct cognition of things. ”

“ Are they heard maintaining that the communication of knowledge, or true notions of things, to youthful minds, will infallibly ensure their virtue and happiness? They are not quite so new to the world, to experimental labor in the business of tuition, or to self-observation. Their vigilance would hardly overlook such a circumstance as the very different degree of assurance with which the effects may be predicted, of ignorance on the one hand, and of knowledge on the other. ”

“ This is, indeed, involved in what has been said about the nature of the process. Insight, as we have seen, though here classed [Pg 229] with preservative cognition, occupies a kind of border-land between immediate knowledge or intuition and inference, shading off from the one to the other. And in the very nature of the case the scope for error must be great. Even overlooking human reticence, and, what is worse, human hypocrisy, the conditions of an accurate reading of others' minds are rarely realized. ”

“ In the unconscious these remain more or less permanently fixed as limited ideas, sentiments, and systems of complexes. Further, those complexes of experiences which persist not only provide the material for our memories, but tend, consciously or unconsciously, to shape the judgments, beliefs, convictions, habits, and tendencies of our mental lives. Whence they came, how they were born, we have long ceased to remember. We often arrive at conclusions which we imagine in our ignorance we have constructed at the moment unaided out of our inner consciousness. ”

“ When I do not find the cognates of this new experience inside, I become dissatisfied. When, not finding the cognates of an impression, we become dissatisfied, this state of the mind is called "ignorance"; but, when, finding the cognates of an impression already existing, we become satisfied, this is called "knowledge". When one apple fell, men became dissatisfied. ”

“ 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. ”