Invisible world

“ We have reason even to suppose that no dream of the invisible world has ever been dreamed,—that no hypothesis of the unseen has ever been imagined,—which future science will not prove to have contained some germ of reality. ”

“ The echo of an invisible world, it is solemn, mysterious, and multiform, appealing to the inmost feelings, rousing the sleeping powers, awakening the internal life of the soul, which without it might lie forever benumbed and silent. ”

“ It is a thought of his, always deeply felt and many times repeated, that this visible world is but the outward shell of an invisible kingdom, a screen which hides from our view things far greater and more wonderful than any which we see, and that the unseen world is close to us and ever ready to break through the shell and manifest itself. ”

“ The motions of the silent, invisible world, where feeling glows and thought flames—that contains all seeds of action—are made known only by sounds and colors, forms, objects, relations, uses and qualities, so that the visible universe is a dictionary, an aggregation of symbols, by which and through which is carried on the invisible commerce of thought. Each object is capable of many meanings, or of being used in many ways to convey ideas or states of feeling or of facts that take place in the world of the brain. ”

“ The invisible world is the substance, the visible world but the shadow. To minds that are not supernatural this world, loud and glaring, is palpable, and therefore thought to be real. The unseen is impalpable, and though not to be denied, yet upon such minds it has no action or constraining power. The great multitude of men live all day long as if there were no unseen world and no world to come. ”

“ Again, is there around us an intelligent atmosphere, a sort of spiritual cosmos? or are there invisible beings, who are not human, but so many gnomes, hobgoblins, or imps?—for such an invisible world may exist around us. ”

“ This fear of the invisible world, so inherent in simple natures, has been implanted for a wise purpose. It keeps alive a consciousness of the immortality of the soul, which otherwise might be disregarded by those who are separated by poverty and distance from coming to the knowledge of revealed truth. ”

“ In every homely conversation this ineffable miracle is wrought: out of the unseen where I dwell, I signal by word and gesture to you back in the unseen where you dwell. We are inhabitants now of the intangible and unseen world; we are as invisible as God. ”

“ He sets out with us, we are persuaded, to conquer ourselves and our world and the stars. And beyond the stars our eyes can as yet see nothing, our imaginations reach and fail. Beyond the limits of our understanding is the veiled Being of Fate, whose face is hidden from us. ”

“ But there is in the universe an inverse current, which interposes itself and perpetually breaks in on the other. It is that of involution, by which the principles, forces, entities and souls which come from the invisible world and the kingdom of the Eternal infiltrate and ceaselessly intermingle with the visible reality. No evolution of matter would be comprehensible without this occult and astral current, which is the great propeller of life, with its hierarchy of powers. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is natural that we should be more interested in the ultimate fate of humanity than in the fate of a world which is of no account to us save as our present dwelling-place. Whether the human soul is to come to an end or not is to us a more important question than whether the visible universe, with its matter and energy, is to be absorbed in an invisible ether. ”

“ Communications with the invisible world are constant, but only exceptional human beings who have had long experience in divine matters and a life mortified and purified by expiation know the mysteries of the invisible world. ”

“ So last January, with the beginning of a snowstorm in the air about me—and if it settled on me it would betray me!—weary, cold, painful, inexpressibly wretched, and still but half convinced of my invisible quality, I began this new life to which I am committed. I had no refuge, no appliances, no human being in the world in whom I could confide. ”

“ This unknowable being, this rover of a supernatural race?
Invisible beings exist, then! How is it then that since the beginning of the world they have never manifested themselves in such a manner precisely as they do to me? I have never read anything which resembles what goes on in my house. ”

“ There may be, right here and now, passing through us and this world, some planet invisible to us, with mountains, oceans, lakes, rivers, cities, and inhabitants: and yet we know absolutely nothing of their existence. ”

“ Precisely the finest and most invisible feelers of our soul run on like roots under the coarse world of sense and are repelled by the most distant agitation. E. g. if the sky is rayless and cloudless toward the east, and toward the west darkened with heavy clouds, I then just in joke turn round and round more than ten times--when I stand facing the east all inner clouds flee away out of my spirit--if I turn toward the west, they hang down again round about it--and in this way by rapid revolutions I compel the most opposite sensations to approach and recede before me. ”

“ We see but dimly here, for we live in the outward world, and only faint yet truthful images of the inner world are revealed to us. No effort of the mind is so difficult as that of lifting itself above the natural and the visible into the spiritual and invisible—invisible, I mean, to the bodily eyes. ”

“ Higher vision it is not given us to see in the dim country of this world; deeper truth we do not need to know.
Working with hands soon to be folded, we build up the structure of our lives from what our fingers can feel, our eyes can see, and our ears can hear. Till, in a moment—marvelous whether it come in storm and tears, or softly as twilight breath beneath unshadowed skies—we are called upon to yield our grasp of these solid things, and trust ourselves to the invisible Soul within us, which betakes itself along an invisible path into the Unknown. ”

“ In fact, man perceives while asleep the things of the invisible world either clearly manifest or under the veil of allegory to be subsequently lifted by divination. If, however, one was to say to a person who had never himself experienced these dreams that, in a state of lethargy resembling death and during the complete suspension of sight, hearing, and all the senses, a man can see the things of the invisible world, this person would exclaim, and seek to prove the impossibility of these visions by some such argument as the following: “The sensitive faculties are the causes of perception. ”

“ In the invisible world, time and space in one sense cease to be; in another sense they remain unchanged. They virtually cease because all our present measures of them are annihilated;11 they virtually remain because exact correspondences to them are left. ”

“ And so the supersensuous world grows and grows big with the invisible present, and big also with the past and the future, crowded with the ghosts of the dead and shadowed with oracles and portents. It is this supersensuous, supernatural world which is the eternity, the other-world, of primitive religion, not an endlessness of time, but a state removed from full sensuous reality, a world in which anything and everything may happen, a world peopled by demonic ancestors and liable to a splendid vagueness, to a "once upon a time-ness" denied to the present. ”

“ 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. ”

“ To these facts I merely added the conjecture that possibly there may be something besides the mere movement of our brains that produces these images of the departed, something—I will not say external, for a spirit, if independent of place, can be neither external to us nor internal—but some act in the invisible world of spirits corresponding to every apparition upon the visible world. ”

“ All continuous existence that appears as non-spiritual life is only an empty shadow projected from the world of sight and enlarged by the intermediary of the nothing—a shadow, in contrast to which, and by recognizing it as a nothing enlarged by transmission, the world of sight itself ought to elevate itself to the recognition of its own nothingness and to the acknowledgment of the invisible as the only thing that is true. ”

“ In this double reality; the reality of one objective universe identical in its appearance to all souls but dependent for its identity upon an implicit reference to the "invisible companions," and the reality of as many subjective universes as there are living souls; in this double reality there is obviously no place at all for that phantom-world of unconscious "matter," which in the form of soulless elements, or soulless organic automata, fills the human mind with such devastating melancholy. ”

“ I looked about me at the hillside, with children playing and girls watching them, and tried to think of all the fantastic advantages an invisible man would have in the world. After a time I crawled home, took some food and a strong dose of strychnine, and went to sleep in my clothes on my unmade bed. ”

“ O World Invisible, we view thee, O World intangible, we touch thee, O World unknowable, we know thee, Inapprehensible, we clutch thee! ”

“ These two thoughts are, first, that behind the visible world there is another, the world invisible, which is hidden from the senses and also from thought that is fettered by these senses; and secondly, that it is possible for man to penetrate into that unseen world by developing certain faculties dormant within him. ”

“ We have nothing to say to gross materialistic notions of ghosts and bogies, and spirits that upset tables and whisper to ignorant vulgar women the wonderful information that you once had an aunt Susan. The unseen world imagined in our hypothesis is not connected with the present material universe by any such "invisible bonds" as would allow Bacon and Addison to come to Boston and write the silliest twaddle in the most ungrammatical English before a roomful of people who have never learned how to test what they are pleased to call the "evidence of their senses." ”

“ Hence 'tis, that the Devil, even like a Dragon, keeping a Guard upon such Fruits as would refresh a languishing World, has hindred Mankind for many Ages, from hitting those useful Inventions, which yet were so obvious and facil, that it is every bodies wonder, they were no sooner hit upon. ”

“ There in their mutable but unerring characters, mixed with the earliest as well as the latest sighs of mortality, stand forever recorded vows unredeemed, promises unfulfilled, perpetuating in the united movements of each particle the testimony of man's changeful will." 6 In some such way as this, records of every movement that takes place in the world are each moment transmitted, with the speed of light, through the invisible ocean of ether with which the world is surrounded. ”

“ Reasoning along the same lines of thought, many great thinkers have held that there is no reason for doubting the possible existence of other world-planes of being, just as real and as actual as the one upon which we live, and move, and have our being, but which is forever invisible to the ordinary human sight 16and senses; the apparent nothingness of such worlds arising solely from the great difference in the rates of vibrations between the two planes of being. ”

“ From the vast, invisible ocean of moonlight overhead fell, here and there, a slender, broken stream that seemed to plash against the intercepting branches and trickle to earth, forming small white pools among the clumps of laurel. But these leaks were few and served only to accentuate the blackness of his environment, which his imagination found it easy to people with all manner of unfamiliar shapes, menacing, uncanny, or merely grotesque.
He to whom the portentous conspiracy of night and solitude and silence in the heart of a great forest is not an unknown experience needs not to be told what another world it all is—how even the most commonplace and familiar objects take on another character. ”

“ It is certain both from Scripture and History, that Magicians by their Inchantments and Hellish Conjurations, may cause a false Representation of Persons and Things. An inchanted eye shall see such things as others cannot discern; it is a thing too well known to be denied, that some by rubbing their eyes with a bewitched Water, have immediately thereupon seen that which others could not discern; and there are Persons in the World, who have a strange Spectral sight. ”

“ If they are real they are natural. To me the spiritistic 'demonstrations' are intensely human and absorbingly interesting as dramatic material, and yet I hope I am sufficiently the scientist to be alive to the significance of these telekinetic happenings, and enough of the realist to remain critical in the midst of the wildest carnival of the invisible forces. ”

“ Though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright. ”